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OTHER BOOKS BY 
DR. KELLEY 


The Open Fire 
Trees and Men 
Down the Road 
The Ilumined Face 
A Pilgrim of the Infinite 
A Salute to the Valiant 
The Ripening Experience of Life 


With the Children: In Lewis 
Carroll’s Company 


“My Gray Gull 


and Other lssays 


WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY 


THE ABINGDON PRESS 


NEW YORK CINCINNATI - 





Copyright, 1926, by 
WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. 


Printed in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
TORR WORD eG iii mtr Rite Man UII Ki ae 9 
PRIM GRAY) GUL a ei kee ee dae 11 
LG Law LELIGION (OF Uae ica or ae eae 20 
III. AN OrcHID IN THE GARDEN OF HUMAN 
SUN TUMEN TS ade se De et a 49 
DV IMAN RTPA ROOK ie de ue hy rece eae 81 
V. Tat WATERMARK IN Human NATURE..... 97 
VI. A PuysicIaAn IN WONDERLAND............ 122 
VII. A Business MAn’s PHILOSOPHY.......... 130 
VIII. Re GaLantuomo: KEEPING ONE’s Worp.. 143 
1X, Tue Evarcs or RMIcULE:....2.....6.... 151 


1. Gold-i-locks and Ribaldry............ 151 
AHA HOOdODeWN BOY (ey oor ie ee alee. 191 
SE SLAW p terete Hicay gull dry Maa NY a IRE DUS nam eA cap 220 





To 
WILLIAM FAIRFIELD WARREN, 


ERUDITE SCHOLAR, GREAT TEACHER, UNIVERSITY BUILDER; 
INSPIRING FRIEND OF MY MATURE YEARS. 


Anp To 
My Litt ie SIsTErR, 
JULIA ISABELLA: 


PLAYMATE OF MY CHILDHOOD; 
NOW NEARLY SIXTY YEARS IN HEAVEN. 





FOREWORD 


In selecting this volume’s essays from a large 
amount of material, the aim has been diversity 
of subject, mood and atmosphere rather than 
uniformity of quality. The result is a miscel- 
lany, part of it the product of long study and 
reflection; other parts in lighter vein, im- 
promptu, informal, spontaneous, and all alike 
imbued with sincerity of purpose and pervaded 
by rational assurance of faith. _ 

Contemplating the possibility that this may be 
the author’s final volume, he sees in it, as in his 
previous books, nothing that demands retrac- 
tion or apology. 

My Gray Gull and The Religion of Infe con- 
tain the matured conclusions and convictions of 
a long, studious, sedulous, and deliberating life, 
listening to all voices, hearing all sides, im- 
pressed most with the purblind crass credulity 
of unbelief. 

Weve: 


ON ALL ACCOUNTS 


We cannot be too decisive in our faith, 
Conclusive and exclusive in its terms. 





What brings out the best of me and bears me fruit 
In power, peace, pleasantness and length of days? 

I find that positive belief does this 

For me, and unbelief no whit of this. 





Well now, there’s one great form of Christian faith 
I happened to be born in,—which to teach 

Was given me as I grew up, on all hands, 

As best and readiest means of living by; 

The same on examination being proved 

The most pronounced, moreover, fixed, precise 

And absolute form of faith in the whole world— 
Accordingly, most potent of all forms 

For working on the world. 





I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 

Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 

All questions in the earth and out of it, 

And hath so far advanced thee to be wise. 
—Robert Browning. 


I 
MY GRAY GULL 


“My gray gull lifts wings against the night- 
fall and takes the dim leagues with a fearless 
eye.’ Many years I have carried that sentence 
in my mental vest pocket, taking it out often to 
show it to others. 

About thirty years ago William James, of 
Harvard, told of a little-known man whose re- 
markable philosophical acumen he praised, and 
exhibited by sample quotations. In one passage 
the man narrated his experience under ether in 
two surgical operations, in which he noted with 
a psychologist’s power of self-observation the 
behavior of his faculties while passing into and 
emerging from unconsciousness. 

By some subtle mental or spiritual process, in- 
communicable to others, but conclusive to him, 
that experience wrought in him a clear and firm 
conviction of his own indestructibility. “And 
so,” concluded Professor James’ gray-headed 
rural philosopher, facing the hereafter, confi- 
dent of personal immortality—“and so my gray 
gull lifts wings against the nightfall and takes 
the dim leagues with a fearless eye.” That sen- 
tence is a gem of literary artistry. 

11 


12 MY GRAY GULL 


AN ARTIST’S STUDIO 


Looking at the prize-winning pictures of Paul 
King, well-known New York-Philadelphia artist, 
in his Philadelphia studio, I said to him, ‘You 
paint pictures with colors, literary art paints 
pictures with words. What think you of this as 
a picture?” Then I repeated slowly the sentence 
about the gray gull lifting gray wings at gray 
nightfall for flight over gray sea, under gray sky, 
taking the dim gray leagues—a color symphony 
in gray, the tones harmonious with the meaning. 
Paul King, the artist, agreed with me that the 
sentence is a perfect work of verbal art, unsur- 
passed for shading and truthfulness. As to its 
accuracy and fidelity to fact, I-think I know that, 
of all adjectives in the dictionary, “fearless” best 
befits the eye of the sea-gull. Again and again 
on shipboard, standing at the stern, I watched 
the bird following close after the ensign-staff in 
straight, level, effortless flight at unvarying 
distance, as if tied to the staff by invisible thread. 
And what I noticed most in that lone sea-bird 
was the calm, steady, unflinching pair of eyes 
fixed fearlessly on me. 

A similarly paintable word-picture of old 
Cavalier days, a symphony of green and brown, 
long ago fixed itself in my pictorial memory: 
“An armed Cavalier at close of day 

Halting his steed beneath a tavern sign 


To quaff a beaker of the landlord’s wine, 
With quip and toast and merry roundelay. 


MY GRAY GULL 13 


“The little bar-maid, with her cheeks aflame, 
Listening his way side wit the while her feet 
Stir idle circles in the dust and beat 

A low refrain, half pleasure and half shame. 


“High overhead the quivering aspens whirled 
By evening winds, and over dale and down 
The highway winding to some happy town 

Beyond the purple borders of the world.” 


That too, differing much from the Gray Gull, is 
a word picture little short of perfection. An 
artist could easily reproduce it in colors on 
canvas. The last two lines are consummate in 
their bright assurance of a happy town on be- 
yond, just out of sight. From any road-house on 
life’s highway the cheerful twilight traveler may 
take the road to Happy Town, beyond the purple 
borders of the world. Oh, quenchless expecta- 
tion of the deathless human soul! 

Assurance of immortality comes variously to 
different minds. Among the pictures in my men- 
tal gallery are two little boys, grandsons of Joel 
Wheeler, in whose hospitable home I was guest 
for a month in the autumn of 1873 as temporary 
pastor of Asbury Church, Buffalo. Two very 
human incidents in that grand-paternal home 
remain vivid. The little chaps were saving 
pennies to build a playhouse in the backyard the 
next spring. Comparing their growing piles, the 
younger said, with calculation in his eye, “Who- 
ever gets the lottest money will have the mostest 
half of the house.” That was the natal day of 


14 MY GRAY GULL 


competitive acquisitiveness, visibly reaching 
after gain, the instinct for self-aggrandizement, 
showing itself early. 

Most memorable of all while I was in that 
home was the day when the baby emerged from 
babyhood into his first pair of trousers. His 
Majesty paraded and pranced through the house 
with menacing self-importance. The strut of 
that pompous man-child was awesome. With 
health and a day he was, like Emerson, making 
the pomp of emperors ridiculous. One might go 
far to find a parallel, and recall not unfittingly 
Macaulay’s lines on “Rome’s proudest day,” 
when “the splendor of her mighty pomp wound 
down the sacred way, and past the bellowing 
forum and through the echoing grove up to the 
everlasting gates of capitolian Jove.” The 
absurd little youngster on that epochal transi- 
tion day was ludicrous, touching, altogether 
lovely. One would think his mother might have 
felt her baby beginning to slip away from her 
into something new and strange but for her pride 
In his normal growth; and, besides, a mother 
never loses her babe; on earth or in heaven he 
is forever her baby. She can still feel her unborn 
child stirring under her heart in years far on 
when he is a middle-aged man. When that 
rugged South-American captain of salvation and 
apostle of civil and religious liberty in benighted 
lands, Dr. Thomas B. Wood, my fellow-student 
at Wesleyan University, came home, a grizzled 


MY GRAY GULL 15 


graybeard, to visit his mother, he was waked in 
the middle of the night by someone feeling of the 
bedclothes in the dark. Half awake, he knew 
whose godlike hands they were, and heard the 
dearest of earthly voices saying, “My boy, have 
you covers enough?” The valiant warrior, 
scarred veteran of many a fight with papal 
powers of darkness, ignorance and superstition, 
was still her baby: she must tuck him in. Dear 
Tom Wood (“Broad West,’ we Easterners called 
the big fellow at Wesleyan) told me that sweet, 
tender story, his voice trembling with pathos, in 
Saint John’s parsonage, Brooklyn, at midnight 
one Sunday, setting my heart aquiver. 

I have wandered far. Back now for a moment 
to Buffalo and the two memorable, immortal 
laddies in the Wheeler home. When the older 
boy came to manhood, incipient consumption 
drove him to the West. When Colorado failed 
to arrest the disease, he came home to die. In 
his last days the young man said, “Mother, I 
know ’m immortal. I can’t tell how I know, but 
I know it.” He was as positive as Emerson, who 
said, “I do not know whether you are immortal, 
but I do know that I shall live forever.” And 
with that great Browningesque affirmation on 
his lips the dear boy’s spirit “lifted wings 
against the nightfall and took the dim leagues 
with a fearless eye.” Though neither philos- 
opher nor poet, nor exceptionally bright, he could 
say, “I know” as positively as they. Humble 


16 MY GRAY GULL 


souls by millions know as much. The other day 
a plain man dying quickly of pneumonia at fifty- 
five in his Maplewood, New Jersey, home, said, 
“Tsn’t it wonderful to be able to face the unseen 
with a cheer?” echoing Browning’s “Greet the 
unseen with a cheer.” 


A SUMMER VACATION 


During the summer of 1916 I was watching 
over three sick persons, strangers to each other, 
hundreds of miles apart, whom Providence com- 
mitted to my care. One, a homeless woman of 
sixty, remnant of a family in which I had min- 
istered to four generations, was dying slowly 
with painful disease in a small private sani- 
tarium at Marblehead. Once a fortnight I spent 
three days in Boston, going daily to Marblehead 
to comfort the sufferer, spending as long a time 
at her bedside as her condition permitted. 

(It was at that bedside that I found again, 
after years of absence, my marvelous soldier girl, 
Norman Derr, lieutenant in the French army, 
furloughed for two months to comfort her saintly 
aunt and godmother, from whose last days 
“Mademoiselle Miss” learned far better how to 
die than her “black pearl-fisher from Guade- 
loupe,” dying for France in her hospital at the 
front, could show her. Unutterable joy it was 
to Llangollen’s half-century friend to recover 
that adorable child, born at Llangollen, New 
Brunswick, known to him from her birth. Four 


MY GRAY GULL 17 


years later, sick and alone in a distant city, she 
cried to me by wire: “I need you desperately. 
When and where can I find you?” Instantly the 
wire flashed back, “Come here.” And Le Bon 
Dieu gave my Norman, broken and ill from scar- 
let fever, and the awful strain of four years of 
frightful war, into my care for the saving of life 
and reason—no more sacred privilege in all my 
eighty years. Thus through many weeks of nurs- 
ing the bond was tightened between that bril- 
liant child of thirty years and the minister to 
three generations in her family before she was 
born. Soul of my soul, her mother says she is. 
A bishop once called himself the son of my soul. 
Hush! Pull down the curtain. This grows too 
intimate and holy for publicity. Thus a merci- 
ful Heaven makes amends to a childless man 
who prizes proxy-fatherhood. ) 

One day when I was at that Marblehead bed- 
side, the longed-for end not far away, the sufferer 
said to me: “‘I wish I had something of mine to 
give you, but in my wandering life I have 
dropped everything. Would you care to have 
that picture pinned on the wall yonder?’ It 
was an unframed photo-copy of a noted painting 
of a gull flying out over the sea. I answered: 
“Oh, Katie, you do not know what you are doing. 
That picture is loaded with meaning for me. 
Nothing you could give me would be valued 
more.” Then I told her the story of William 
James’ gray-haired philosopher, to whose preg- 


18 MY GRAY GULL 


nant, picturesque sentence the picture she was 
giving me might have suggested its figure of 
speech. I took her gift back home with me from 
my last visit to her, and for seven years after 
Norman Derr and her father and I had laid the 
tortured body in the distant family burying place 
beyond Llangollen, I kept that gull picture on 
my study wall, and often, when not equal to 
writing or reading, I sat in my easy-chair rest- 
ing my eyes on that fearless, feathered aeronaut 
and meditating on wings and immortality. The 
picture was destroyed in the fire which con- 
sumed my library and endangered my life, 
December 31, 1922. 

Conscious of wings, poised for far flight, ex- 
pectant of spacious destiny the human spirit is, 
in all sorts and conditions of men. “I thought 
I was about to sprout my wings,” said Captain 
Lund, of the Osceola, on Saint John’s River, on 
his second trip after dangerous pneumonia, 
Standing on deck and pointing out to his pas- 
Sengers the eagles’ nests in tall trees along the 
river. O eagles and sea-gulls, ye are not winged 
for endless flight as we waddling, toddling 
pedestrians, immortal mortals, are. 


At FOURSCORE 


Dying is as natural as being born, and each 
is entrance on a larger life. At four score one 
may say with the master-poet of the nineteenth 
century: 


MY GRAY GULL 19 


“T go to prove my soul, 
I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
God guides me and the birds, 
I shall arrive.” 


And with the rural philosopher, “My gray gull 
lifts its wings against the nightfall and takes 
the dim leagues with a fearless eye.” 

But for supreme assurance we listen to One 
august, imperial, transcendently Authoritative 
Voice sounding from Calvary and Olivet and 
now from the Heaven of heavens: “Because I live 
ye shall live also. I go to prepare a place for 
you, that where I am there ye may be also.” To 
that assurance of the divine Truthteller, John 
Bunyan, with his last breath, responded, “Take 
me, for I come to thee.” Having pondered long 
and listened to all voices, I will take His word, 
“Ye shall live also,” against all the futile folk 
who set up blatant nescience in denial of Christ’s 
supreme and infinite certitude. I have not found 
His equal in knowledge, truthfulness, and wis- 
dom. “All other ground is sinking sand.” 


II 
THE RELIGION OF LIFE 


“The Christian bell, the cry from off the mosque, 
and vaguer voices of polytheism, make but one 
music.” 


So sang Tennyson, and, so saying, sang amiss. 
If he had said that these various religions are 
born of the same needs and cravings in human 
nature and are manifestations of man’s spiritual 
capacities, he would have spoken truly. But 
there is no such equality among religions as his 
words imply. In no sense do the Christian 
church bell and the muezzin’s cry and the poly- 
phonic Babel of polytheism “make the same 
music” or sound alike to the ear or to the soul. 

To note only one difference—not to woman’s 
ears do the Mohammedan muezzin and the Chris- 
tian-church bell sound alike. The muezzin means 
the Turkish harem, with its semi-imprisonment, 
its miscellaneousness, its lack of refinement, edu- 
cation, and purity. The bell means the Christian 
home, with its freedom, its dignity, its honor, 
and the sort of womanhood that could make col- 
lege boys call the graceful daughters of a cer- 
tain university professor “the evidences of 
Christianity.” The cry from off the minaret of 

20 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 21 


the mosque suggests the difference between a 
harem and a home, a difference vast and abysmal. 

And not to woman’s ears do the “voices of poly- 
theism make the same music” as the Christian 
bell. In India, that land which is a squirming 
nest of polytheisms, the zenanas, with their 
segregated, shut-in and suppressed women, and . 
the senselessly cruel customs which oppress 
widows and children, do not remind Rudyard 
Kipling of the home he was born in and the 
Christian homes with which he is familiar any 
more than the harsh conch-shells blowing from 
the temples their raucous call to come and wor- 
ship idols which grated in his ears one Christmas 
Day, reminded him of the holy cheer of London’s 
Christmas chimes, or than the vile rites of the 
obscenely hideous temples of Benares resemble 
the pure and ennobling worship of Westminster. 

On one of my visits to the famous New Hamp- 
Shire school, Phillips-Exeter, an oppressive 
silence befell in the after-service when the boys 
were expected to question the visiting speaker 
about anything in his address or in their own 
minds. Not one question, and this visitor had 
to break the silence. Knowing that school to 
be a feeder for Harvard, he began: “At Harvard 
University [the boys pricked up their ears] there 
was a professor who had three very beautiful 
daughters [expectancy on every face]. What 
do you suppose the students called those girls? 
[A pause to let the boys wonder.] They called 


22 MY GRAY GULL 


them The Evidences of Christianity. [A long 
pause to let the boys ponder.] Wasn’t it fine in 
those university men to think of the girls in that 
way?” Then the visitor leaned toward his audi- 
ence, settled to his task and drove the lesson 
home, saying, “Yes, it was fine, but the best thing 
about it was that it is trwe, everlastingly and 
world-widely TRUE. It is perfectly fair to judge 
any system of thought, morals, or religion by its 
effects and products in character and life. 
Earth’s One Infallible Teacher settled that: ‘By 
their fruits ye shall know them.’” And the 
superiority of Christian womanhood, command- 
ing honor and deference from men, is one of the 
chief Evidences of Christianity. 

“Vaguer” is an apt adjective for Tennyson to 
apply to “the voices of polytheism,” though their 
vileness is far from being vague. Even Rabin- 
dranath Tagore, though at times more Christian 
than pagan, is vague, dreamy, indefinite, rose- 
misty. 

The laureate would have spoken truth if he 
had said that the ethnic and pagan religions 
compare with Christianity about as the music of 
their lands compares with the music of Chris- 
tian countries. In the Metropolitan Museum of 
New York city there is the largest and complet- 
est possible collection of musical instruments 
from many tribes and nations and lands, ancient 
and modern. Compare not only rude, primitive 
instruments of ancient barbarian peoples, but 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 23 


the gongs and tom-toms of modern pagan na- 
tions with the perfection achieved in the piano 
and the violin. What have the Christless nations 
to show alongside the orchestras and choirs 
which render the great Christian anthems and 
chants and oratorios, like Haydn’s “Creation” 
and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Handel’s 
“Messiah” with its Hallelujah Chorus, in which 
you can hear the morning stars singing together 
and the sons of God shouting for joy? Take the 
most miraculous of instruments and listen to its 
incredible capabilities. Imagine a Stradivarius 
in the hands of Ole Bull. See what Paganini 
can do with only a single string. To show what 
can be done, he stands before a great audience 
and draws his bow across the strings so sharply 
as to break one string. The audience mutters 
its surprise. He does the same with every string 
save one, while the angry audience groans its 
amazement and disgust. Only one string left, 
one string and Paganini! A hush falls on the 
crowded house, until in the painful silence the 
sound of that one lone, forlorn string is heard. 
“And now ’twas like all instruments, now like 
a lonely flute; and now ’twas like an angel’s song 
that bade the heavens be mute.” He worked 
miracle on miracle of instrumentation, simply to 
show how much music is latent in one string, 
and how easily a master can bring it out; just 
as the Master, Christ, can take one individual 
soul, like Charles Wesley’s, or F. W. Faber’s, or 


24 MY GRAY GULL 


Mary A. Lathbury’s, and evoke from it a music 
which shall ripple like the morning in the 
farthest horizons of the world, and live through 
ages, and wake the echoes of the stellar spaces. 

We think it would not have been unfair to say 
to Tennyson that the cry of the muezzin from the 
minaret of the mosque and the polyphonic Babel 
of polytheism compare with the Christian bell 
about as their musical instruments and compo- 
sitions and vocalizations compare with the high 
and exquisite perfection, the almost divine har- 
monies, suggestive of the music of the spheres, 
which genius has achieved under the refining and 
elevating influence of Christian ideals, the 
stimulus of the Christian aspiration toward per- 
fection, and of the joyousness which has been 
Singing in the world since the angels sang over 
Bethlehem on the night of the nativity—the joy 
begotten of the hallowed glory of the Christian 
faith, and by the knowledge that God was in 
Christ reconciling the world unto himself, 
“Christian Perfection,” which is, as Bishop 
Birney says, the “Great Expectation” in char- 
acter, is also seen in the superexcellence of 
Christian music. What non-Christian people 
have produced anything like “the molded notes 
of Mendelssohn”? If, as has been said, “music 
is the solace of the gods for all the ills of life,” 
then the gods of non-Christian peoples have pro- 
vided small solace for them. A brilliant anti- 
Christian critic, speaking of art generally, 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 25 


whether in music, or painting, or sculpture, or 
literature, unconsciously offers testimony and 
tribute to Christianity when he says, “In judg- 
ing artists of every kind I make use of this one 
test question, ‘Has the hatred of life or the love 
of life been at work here?’ Is the artist cynical 
or enthusiastic toward life, deficient in or 
exuberant of life?” The critic’s doctrine is that 
high quality and potency in art are born of 
“superabundance of life.” By his use of almost 
the exact words of Christ, even this Christless 
critic unintentionally brings into view and sets 
in the foreground Him who said, “I am come 
that the world may have life more abundant.” 
Part of the fulfillment of that promise is seen in 
the primacy and perfection of Christian art in 
musie and in other realms. 

“The Christian bell,’ which Tennyson’s care- 
less words seem to lower to the Moslem’s level, 
and lower still to the conch-shell’s screech, has 
never yet been duly celebrated. Its melody and 
meaning cast a heavenly spell. What a sub- 
duing, solemnizing, and sanctifying spell fell 
over Syracuse in the evening half-hours, when, 
during the month of preparation for the Billy 
Sunday campaign, the chimes of the city shook 
down upon streets and homes in the twilight the 
sacred influence of such tunes as “Sweet Hour 
of Prayer,’ “Rock of Ages,” “Jesus, Lover of 
My Soul,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,’ and 
“Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”! 


26 MY GRAY GULL 


Ernest Renan, whenever he revisited the village 
of his birth, even in his most sceptical years, felt 
the spell of the church spire with its bells hush- 
ing his heart with a back-flow of the reverent reli- 
gion of his childhood, and his soul renewed its 
obeisance to the church as the abiding emblem 
and exponent of the highest vocation of man. To 
a devoted daughter, watching for her sick 
mother’s final breath, the sweet-toned bell in the 
tower of the village church at Clifton Springs, 
calling through the dusk to evening prayers, 
seemed like the bells of the Celestial City, ring- 
ing to welcome her saintly mother home to the 
life eternal. Conch-shell or Christian bell? Can 
any human being who has heard both and knows 
their meaning hesitate which of them to choose? 


CHRISTIANITY’S SUPERIORITY 


In numerous particulars Christianity is un- 
duplicated, unparalleled, unapproached. The 
sum total of those particulars makes the gospel 
stand alone, gives it a place preeminent, tran- 
scendent, supreme. 

(a) It alone has the full, clear revelation of 
the Fatherhood of God, with its corollary, the 
brotherhood of man. 

(b) It alone shows a Saviour who dies, the 
just for the unjust, to bring men to God. Neither 
Vyasa, Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, nor Mo- 
hammed makes for himself the claim, nor his 
disciples for him, that he is without sin, and 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 27 


that as the one Sinless One, he dies an atoning 
death for the sins of the whole world. For no 
founder of any pagan or ethnic faith is such a 
claim made. 

(c) Because of these and other distinguish- 
ing contents and elements of the Christian reve- 
lation, certifying its incomparable divineness, 
the gospel’s gloriousness is unapproached. 

(d) But its most singular and separating 
claim is that a dead and buried Man is the source 
and ever-living sustainer of the world’s spiritual 
life. This was Christ’s declaration concerning 
himself: “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I 
am the life.’ This, also from the first, was the 
claim of his disciples and apostles for him: “He 
is risen from the dead, and is alive forevermore ;” 
and they sealed that declaration with their blood. 
The great apostle testified, “It is Christ that 
liveth in me,” and preached to the early Chris- 
tians, “Christ is your life.” 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 


“Christianity the Religion of Life” is a claim 
not difficult to substantiate. No other religion 
so identifies itself with life, or is so vitalizing 
and energizing to all man’s nobler powers, as is 
the religion of Christ. And this is one of the 
reasons why it will survive and spread and con- 
quer. Andreyey, the Russian, says: “Life is 
bound to triumph, and only that which makes 
for abundance of life can abide. I never believed 


28 MY GRAY GULL 


in the supremacy of life so much as when I read 
the works of Schopenhauer, the father of pessi- 
mism. Since a man could think so gloomily and 
bitterly about life as he did, and yet consent to 
live, continue to live, and prefer to live, it is 
evident that life is mighty and unconquerable. 

Not systems nor views nor theories will 
conquer. Only that which is united with life 
will conquer: that which strengthens the roots 
and motives of life and justifies it. Only that 
which is useful in life continues and remains; 
all that is harmful to it will inevitably perish, 
sooner or later. Even if the harmful thing 
Stands to-day as an indestructible wall against 
which the heads of the noblest peoples are break- 
ing in the struggle, it will fall to-morrow; it will 
fall because it wanted to impede and restrict 
life, the fullness and freedom of life.” 

What the world decides about life it will 
decide about Christ. Not till it rejects life will 
it reject him. Nothing short of the universal 
and final denial of the wish for life and the will 
to live can bring about the rejection of Chris- 
tianity. The ultimate supremacy of Jesus over 
the world rests on the verdict of life, and the 
love of life is sure to insure the final world-wide 
acceptance of the gospel of Christ. Only uni- 
versal pessimism and hatred of life could pre- 
vent that, however slow and wavering the prog- 
ress seems to us short-lived creatures of myopic 
vision, faint courage, and of little faith. 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 29 


Is it not true that the most central, funda- 
mental, tenacious, and universal of human 
instincts is the love of life? Richard Jeffries, 
in his Story of My Heart, tells us that there was 
a time when a weary restlessness came upon him. 
He thirsted for some pure, fresh springs of 
thought and feeling. An instinctive longing 
drove him to the sea. To get to the sea at some 
quiet spot was his one desire. And this is what 
he did: “The great sun shone above, the wide sea 
was before me, the wind came sweet and strong 
from the waves. The life of the sea and the glow 
of the sun filled me. I touched the surge with 
my hands, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened 
my lungs to the wind. I was in love with life. 
Then I prayed; yes, I prayed aloud in the roar 
of the waves.” And what was his prayer? This: 
“Give me fullness of life, like to the sea, and the 
sun, and the earth, and the air, clean and strong 
and sweet. And give me also greatness and 
health and perfection of soul above all things.” 
That was and is the craving of the normal man. 
“Fullness of life” is his cry. Not to be less, but 
to be more. Life, the life which is life indeed. 
He cannot get enough of it. Insatiable is the 
lover of life. 

A few repudiate and reject life; but that is un- 
natural and insane. The number of suicides 
does not exceed the number of lunatics. And no 
one, whether sane or insane, flings life away 
until it seems no longer life but a living death. 


30 MY GRAY GULL 


It is not life that they hate. Alfred Tennyson’s 
lines are true: 
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Hath ever truly longed for death. 
*Tis life of which our veins are scant, 
Oh, life, not death, for which we pant, 
More life and fuller that we want.” 


In one widespread religion there is a special 
inferiority. Buddhism, longing for nonexist- 
ence, is subvital, a sickly mood, a soul-disabling 
depression, lacking hope and courage. It is 
melancholia made into a religion, the morbid, un- 
wholesome, and unnatural cult of a desire to 
perish. A dejected lot are the pilgrims of Tibet, 
marching to Lhassa, but seeking the road to 
Nowhere and Nothingness, droning their lifeless 
chant: 


“Turn the wheel and beat the drum 
Till we to Nirvana come,” 


and worshiping by mechanism. Wheel-prayer 
rimes with wheel-chair and suggests invalidism 
and disablement. It is inconceivable that the hu- 
man race can find its home in Mohammedanism 
or Buddhism. A great All-India Convention of 
Religions was held at Allahabad. Hinduism, 
Islamism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, 
and TH eneA ie were all strongly represented. 
But it was agreed, by general consent, that the 
only message that “struck warm” was the witness 
of the Indian Christians to the love and power 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 31 


of Christ. To that testimony a sympathetic 
chord of response vibrated in all hearts. And, 
at the close of the Convention, the Hindu secre- 
tary exclaimed, “The one thing that we could 
not have dispensed with was the Christian con- 
tribution.” Turning my eyes toward heathen- 
dom this is what happened to me: 
“Sudden, before my inward open vision, 
Millions of faces crowded up to view, 


Sad eyes that said, ‘For us is no provision; 
Give us your Saviour too.’ 


““Give us,’ they cry, ‘your cup of consolation; 
Never to our outreaching hands ’tis passed; 
We long for the Desire of every nation, 
And, oh, we die so fast!’ ” 


Dr. Camden M. Cobern, discussing the ancient 
philosophy of Wang Yang Ming, notes the de- 
vitalizing influence of the deadening delusion 
called Buddhism on even the modern thought of 
China and Japan. Give mankind their choice 
between fullness of life and extinction of life: 
which will they choose? The Christian duty is 
to put the choice before them. 


REAL LIres 


Man wants a life which is real. “Lay hold 
on eternal life,” wrote Paul to Timothy. “Lay 
hold on the life which is life indeed,” one Re- 
vised Version renders it. The demand for 
reality is distinctive. The craving is sometimes 
dormant, sometimes active and insistent, as seen 


32 MY GRAY GULL 


not only in high-browed philosophers searching 
for the Ultimate Reality, sounding for the Welt- 
grund, but even sometimes in little children 
making first acquaintance with the world in 
which they find themselves. A baby was in his 
mother’s arms at sunset. The mother tells the 
story: 


“The sunset glow was fading. My baby boy with me, 
Watching the glorious shading of brilliant clouds 
parading, 
Looked up; and then as if to ken what older eyes 
could see, 
Said, ‘Mamma, is it true? Is it true, all true— 
The purple and gold and blue?’ 


“And what could I say to my little boy blue, 
Except, ‘It is true, Sweetheart, all true’? 
And the dear head nestling upon my breast, 
The eyelids drooping to joyful rest, 
The lips, as if a tryst to keep, 
Said, ‘Please, mamma, put me up there to sleep, ” 


Another day when the baby was a bit older 
he was on his father’s knee hearing the Christ- 
mas story read from the Great Book. The 
father says: 


“The Bible closing slowly, the boy upon my knee, 
Seeing the manger lowly enfold the Christ-child 
holy 
Looked up again as if to ken what older thoughts 
must be. 
‘But, papa, is it true? Is it all, all true ?’ 


“And what could I say to those eager eyes, blue, 
Except, ‘It is true, Sweetheart, all true’? 

And his eyes grew brighter with faith’s keen sight, 
And his cheeks aglow with Hope’s warm light, 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 33 


His lips, with Love’s unsullied joy, 
Said, ‘Papa, tell Jesus Ill be his boy.’ 


“So, with the old, old story, of unseen things above, 
That blessed boy story of Jesus and his glory, 
There came to me, from Galilee, in Jesus’ voice of 

love 
His promise, unbeguiled, of heaven, undefiled, 
If I too become a child.” 


Thus, mother, father, and child, seeking the 
true and the real, rested together in Jesus, the 
Christ, the real-life giver. 


ABUNDANT LIFE 


Take him all in all, in superb physique, robust 
mentality, and affluent red-blooded temperament, 
Phillips Brooks, with the swift onrush of his im- 
passioned speech and in the total power of his 
tremendous appeal, was probably the most 
majestic figure in the American pulpit in his day. 
In Philadelphia and the regions round about, in 
the years when he was rector of Holy Trinity 
Church and Matthew Simpson was resident 
bishop, there was mighty apostolic preaching 
from those two royal ambassadors of Jesus 
Christ, both of them manifestly in the apostolic 
succession. Possibly Phillips Brooks knew as 
well as any man of his generation what Chris- 
tianity is. The world recognized him as an em- 
bodiment of it. He was a massive and majestic 
Christian. Also he probably understood what 
was the mission of Christ in the world, the 


34 MY GRAY GULL 


errand on which the Son of God came from 
heaven. He has left his statement. Toward the 
end of his life he said he had had, in reality, 
only one text in all his ministry. He had been 
an incessant and insatiable preacher, eager to 
preach seven days in the week. Few men have 
preached as many sermons as he. Hundreds of 
them are in printed volumes on our shelves. 
Each sermon is headed with a different text. 
Yet, essentially, substantially, in reality, one 
text would cover the whole, the words of Jesus 
in John 10. 10: “I am come that they may have 
life, and have it more abundantly.” That was 
the meaning of the gospel Phillips Brooks 
preached. It was the gospel of a more abundant 
life. Bishop William EF. McDowell, being asked 
what were the subjects of his nine baccalaureate 
sermons as chancellor of Denver University, 
said: “I had different texts, but my only subject 
was Jesus Christ, the Life-giver.”’ 


CuHrIst Has “Mapp Goop” 


“T am come that they might have life, and that 
they might have it more abundantly.” 


Many centuries have passed since that declara- 
tion was made by the Man of Galilee. For every- 
one who lives and thinks there can be no more 
interesting and important question than whether 
the expectation raised and the promise implied 
in that unparalleled announcement by one who 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 35 


claimed to be divine have been met and ful- 
filled. Well, it should not be difficult to get an 
answer to that question. Through long cen- 
turies countless millions have put Jesus and his 
gospel to the test, and thus became qualified to 
report on the result. The truth is easy to find, 
for the facts are recorded in the most conspicuous 
_and indubitable pages of history. Who was the 
Galilean who so long ago gave Phillips Brooks 
the one all-inclusive theme and text for his life- 
time? Well, whoever he was, one thing is sure, 
he has made good on his promise wherever and 
whenever he has been allowed to try. “Has 
Christianity succeeded in the world?” asked a 
Yale student of Professor George P. Fisher, a 
great church historian, who answered, “The 
world has not tried it.’ He may have had in 
mind what Lessing said a century before when 
looking at the defects of Christians and the 
church and current, conventional Christianity: 
“Christianity has failed; the religion of Christ 
remains to be tried.” Only they who have tried 
the religion of Christ are competent to testify. 
Produce the records and call the witnesses, and 
when you have examined both, fling out this chal- 
lenge: 

NEVER ONCE SINCE THAT ANNOUNCE- 
MENT WAS MADE HAS JESUS CHRIST 
FAILED to give a fuller and more abundant life 
to any human being who honestly put him to 
the test and gave him a free chance by accepting 


36 MY GRAY GULL 


and acknowledging him and cooperating with 
him. 

(a) Never in twenty centuries has one home 
admitted Jesus to its love and worship without 
having its life made fuller, richer, and more 
beautiful. 

(b) Never has any community regarded the 
wisdom and authority of Christ by applying his 
moral standards to the regulation of its affairs 
and customs without its communal life being 
cleansed, morally and physically. And the one 
great lesson taught by Christianity through the 
centuries, and equally in our day by science, is 
that cleanliness, physical and moral, means 
health for body and soul, and health means life, 
life more abundant and vigorous. 

(c) Never has any state or nation embodied 
Christian principles in its laws and practiced 
them in its intercourse with other nations with- 
out uplifting and ennobling its own life and add- 
ing to its dignity, prestige, and power. Few 
names in the roll of American statesmen are 
so surely illustrious as that of John Hay, who 
as secretary of state carried truth and honesty 
and justice and the Golden Rule into diplomacy. 
He lifted the international dealings of his coun- 
try to the Christian level. 


HicHest Moray LIirp 


Christianity’s superiority is shown in its hold- 
ing up the noblest ideals of character and incul- 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE ot 


cating and enjoining the highest ethics. For 
example, Christ’s Golden Rule surpasses that of 
Confucius as active doing good surpasses mere 
refraining from wrong and cruelty. Li Hung 
Chang confessed when in America that the 
urgent and stimulating Christian incitement, 
“Do unto others as ye would that they should do 
to you,’ is a nobler and worthier teaching than 
the mere negative check against cruelty and in- 
justice imposed by the Confucian “Do not unto 
others what ye would not wish them to do to 
you.” Confucius says, “Avoid being moral crimi- 
nals; be half noble.” In the one the life of right- 
eousness is too feeble to be efficient ; in the other 
it is energetic and active, the high tide of moral 
life flooding the coasts and inlets of human senti- 
ment and conduct. 

Listen, all who deny or question. The Life- 
giver who came to give the world a more abun- 
dant life has made good wherever he has been 
given a chance. Nowhere is there a single bit of 
testimony from individual, family, community, 
or nation, that Jesus Christ has failed in any 
instance to keep his promise of a fuller, happier, 
and stronger life. 

He who is the promiser is also the giver of the 
life more abundant. What is the purpose of reli- 
gion and morality? Their purpose is to 
strengthen life by cleansing, rectifying, and in- 
spiriting it. In Professor George H. Palmer’s 
book on the Field of Ethics, the main proposition 


38 MY GRAY GULL 


is that the clearest statement of the purpose and 
effect of both morality and religion is found in 
the announcement made by Jesus, “I am come 
that men might have life, and that they might 
have it more abundantly.” 

It is not strange that He who is the source of 
religion and morality—who is the power that 
makes for righteousness in each soul and in so- 
ciety—could most clearly state, as the Harvard 
professor truly says, the purpose and effect of 
both. And the fact that he best knew and could 
most clearly state the object and purpose of 
morality and religion is confirmatory of his 
claim to be the source and the enabling power of 
both. 

That he is that source of power was his an- 
nouncement concerning himself. It has always 
been the claim of his disciples and followers for 
him. It is the testimony of all who have received 
his gospel and have let him try his power on them 
unhindered. 

The source of moral life, like the secret of the 
tides, is above the earth. Through untold ages 
the tides of the restless ocean were ebbing and 
flowing on all the coasts of the world, without the 
tribes of men knowing or suspecting what power 
it really was that lifted and swung them to and 
fro. The natural idea was that the mighty move- 
ment originated within the ocean itself and was 
due to some tremendous force deep in the bosom 
of the sea. But in the course of time a day 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 39 


arrived when it was perceived that the cause of 
this great movement was not in the sea itself, 
and was not of the earth at all, but was up 
yonder in the heavens. A man pointed to the 
moon and said: “There is the shining cause of 
all the tides. The moon reaches down long arms 
and lays its mighty hands upon the vast waters 
and lifts and swings them back and forth from 
shore to shore.” 

In like manner, the hearts of men from the 
beginning were moved within them by some mys- 
terious power ever since men were men and 
hearts were hearts; but they knew not whence 
it really came. They thought it originated within 
themselves. They never dreamed it was from 
above, or if they dreamed, they did not know. 
Their restless spirits, stirred by longings, lift- 
ings, surgings to and fro, knew not that an 
eternal Spirit moves upon the minds and hearts 
of men. There was no one to say to them, “It is 
God that worketh in you.” But the day of full 
revelation and illumination came. 

Christ is the source of the world’s moral life. 
Paul explained to the Romans that the cause of 
the life divine in the souls of men was that 
“nower of Jesus Christ which was kept secret 
since the world began, but is now made mani- 
fest.” And this is that “power which worketh 
in you,” concerning which he wrote to the 
Ephesians. From the infinite Father of spirits 
proceed the forces which rouse, regenerate, and 


40 MY GRAY GULL 


transform human nature, and these divine influ- 
ences are mediated to mankind for their salva- 
tion by Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, through the 
Holy Spirit. This is Matthew Arnold’s “Power 
that makes for righteousness” in human char- 
acter and conduct; which is “the power of an 
endless life,” and which makes Paul exult in “the 
exceeding greatness of his power to usward who 
believe,” the Power divine, revealed and com- 
municated from above by Him who came down 
from above to show us the Father. 

To whom shall we go? Not to Vyasa or 
Zoroaster, not to Confucius or Buddha, not to 
the Greek gods or the Roman or Egyptian, but 
to Him whom we can worship, Saying, “Thou 
alone hast the words of eternal life ;’ to Him who 
says: “TI am the way, the truth, and the life. No 
man cometh unto the Father but by me >” “Be- 
cause I live ye shall live also;” of whom Paul 
says, “Christ who is our life,’ and in whom 
Whittier trusted in the last verses he ever wrote: 


“Giftless we come to Him who all things gives, 
And live because He lives.” 


This is Christianity’s explanation of all the 
moral and spiritual life of the world. Wherever 
on the earth there is a bit of life that is holy and 
happy, it is so because the power of the unseen 
Christ is at work there. He alone has said, “I 
am the life,” and only his presence brings “the 
life that is life indeed.” 


‘THE RELIGION OF LIFE AY 


And looking abroad more widely, outside of 
the question of the genesis of the religious life, 
to this complexion will the world’s philosophies 
come at last: Christianity’s explanation of 
things, of the entire system of things, of things 
in general, and of man m particular, will be 
found to be the most plausible, reasonable, 
provable, and convincing of all explanations, and 
even physical science will ultimately have noth- 
ing to say against it. 

It was a sturdy master mind, not unaware of 
any knowledge, but holding in full survey the 
realm of modern science and philosophy, who 
made the stout and sweeping affirmation : 


“T say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
Accepted by the reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise.” 


The solution of all human questions is in and 
from the revelation of God in Christ, and He who 
is the Light of the World will lead a groping 
and bewildered race, sadly fumbling all its prob- 
lems, out of darkness to sure solution. 


MAKING THis Lire KNOWN 


The supreme duty and service to men is to 
make known the “Life which is life indeed,” with 
its explanation and source. A few years ago the 
two leading philosophers of the Continent, 
Bergson of France and Eucken of Germany, came 


42 MY GRAY GULL 


from Europe, not far apart, to lecture in 
America. Their themes were substantially 
identical. In an age infatuated with physical 
Science and mechanical triumphs, and _ over- 
weighted toward materialism, they lifted high 
and loud the spiritual note; they made men hear 
the cry of the spirit which is in man. They 
asserted the rights and claims of the human soul, 
the reality and indispensableness of the spiritual 
life. They illuminated the nature of that life 
and set forth its rational explanation; they de- 
clared and argued the divine authenticity, the 
intelligibility and validity of spiritual experi- 
ence. With clearness and great intellectual force 
these two sure-footed master thinkers delivered 
their message to packed audiences, and made 
good on their mission, casting the spell of the 
spirit and making thoughtful minds aware of 
the things which are unseen and eternal. In 
their addresses “the intellectual power, through 
words and things, went sounding,” not on “a dim 
and perilous way,” but on a clear, straight, well- 
built highway, firm for the soul’s pilgrimage. 
Reasoning in a realm where definite intellectual 
grasp and exact analysis are difficult even for 
the acutest and ablest minds, and where clear 
definition and convincing reasoning are achieved 
by few, a realm in which the main reliance must 
be on the self-evidencing power of its realities 
within the individual soul,—reasoning in that 
Sublimated realm, Bergson and Eucken yet set 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 43 


forth successfully, with powerful and inspiring 
cogency, the Religion of Life. Wherever they 
spoke they clarified and freshened the atmos- 
phere of thought and feeling. In the great battle 
always going on everywhere for the rights of 
the soul, Bergson and Eucken are at one end 
of the firing line, with Billy Sunday at the 
other; the philosophers of university halls and 
the evangelist in his tabernacle crying each in 
the dialect of his own training and each reaching 
his own public, “Life, life, eternal life!’ and 
each rendering incalculable service to the world. 


Witrn CHRIST IN GLORY 


“Your life is hid with Christ in God,” there- 
fore “when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, 
then shall ye also appear with him in glory,” 
Paul wrote to the Colossians. When we take the 
message in, when the full force of its wondrous- 
ness breaks over us, our astonished hearts cry, 
“What! such creatures as we ‘appear with Him in 
glory’? Incredible!” 

“How can it be, thou heavenly King, 
That thou shouldst us to glory bring, 


Make slaves the partners of thy throne, 
Decked with a never-fading crown? 


“Hence, our hearts melt, our eyes o’erflow, 
Our words are lost, nor will we know 
Nor will we think of aught beside 

My Lord, my Love is crucified.” 


We look up with adoring gratitude to the 


44 MY GRAY GULL 


God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and 
say: 
How thou can’st think so well of us, 
Yet be the God thou art, 
Is darkness to my intellect, 
But sunshine to my heart. 


We share the well-reasoned confidence of the 
good old hymn our mothers used to sing: 
“And when I’m to die, 
‘Receive me,’ Ill ery; 


For Jesus hath loved me, 
I cannot tell why. 


“But this I do find, 

We two are so joined, 
He'll not stay in glory, 
And leave me behind.” 


Love shares everything with the loved one. 
The reason which rules and the law which works 
in Christ’s exaltation of those on whom he has 
set his love are not unfamiliar to us. We see 
the same law at work in human relationships on 
all levels of our earthly life. The matter is not 
hard to understand. Whether on earth or in 
heaven, love always exalts and enriches to the 
limit of its power those on whom it bestows it- 
Self, and shares with them its own best fortune. 

When King Cophetua loves a beggar maid, the 
beggar maid is lifted to the level of the king. 
Her life enters into the splendor of his life now. 
The poor old beggar life is gone. She leaves 
her hut for his palace. The king has made life 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE 45 


royal and rich for her. Henceforth he shares 
with her his glory. 

In Rome they used to show you the window at 
which Raphael wooed the Fornarina, the baker’s 
daughter. It was not a lofty palace window, 
but a lowly lattice in a humble home on the level 
of the street. What cared Rome for that baker’s 
daughter? Nothing. Buta great artist crowned 
her with the dearest honors of his heart, and 
because Raphael loved that simple maiden he 
put her features into the faces of his Madonnas, 
so that it is her face you see in his great paint- 
ings; therefore so long as canvas lasts and art 
endures, so long as men remember Raphael, they 
must remember her. See, this is the point: he 
makes her as immortal as himself, he shares with 
her his glory 

Down the river Clyde to Greenock go tourists 
to see there the grave of Burns’ Highland Mary. 
Little reason have we to suppose her superior to 
a hundred other lassies in other Scotch towns 
or countrysides. Then why do tourists care to 
find her grave? Because Bobbie Burns loved 
her and sang about her and wedded her; made 
her name as lasting as the undying poetry of 
Scotland’s most gifted bard, the poet of the 
homely human heart. Of fame he had much, 
and he shared with her his glory. 

One day a strong man stood on the portico 
of the Capitol at Washington to be inaugurated 
President of the United States. It was his 


46 MY GRAY GULL 


day of glory. When the Chief Justice had ad- 
ministered to him the oath of office, and he had 
kissed the Bible in token of his reverence for the 
sacred Word, and of the solemn sanctity of his 
oath, he lifted his lips from the Holy Book, and 
turning his back on the applauding crowd, 
stepped back to a white-haired little woman 
seated just behind him, and stooping, pressed 
his lips to hers in a kiss as reverent as he had 
pressed upon the Bible. She was his mother, a 
plain and simple woman, humble and unknown 
to the world, his widowed mother. When James 
A. Garfield’s hour of glory drew near, his heart 
said to her, “When I shall appear at the top of 
human eminence in sight of the whole world, you 
also shall appear with me in glory.” That is the 
way human love does, and that, too, is the way 
divine love does. 

Christ shares his glory. “Ye shall appear with 
him in glory.” That is the destiny of the great 
Saints of the ages, and not less of the obscure 
and unknown and self-distrusting. When John 
Wesley was dying, one of his faithful friends, not 
present with him, knowing that a great soul was 
passing yonder into the heavens, kept saying, 
“Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lifted 
up, ye everlasting doors, and this heir of glory 
Shall come in.” And that is the lawful, war- 
ranted expectation of all who truly trust in 
Christ. 

Of the father of William Hazlitt we are told 


THE RELIGION OF LIFE AG 


that when he was nearing the end of life at the 
age of eighty-four, he “made no complaint, but 
went on talking of glory, honor, and immortality 
to the end,” in high and assured reliance on his 
Master’s Word and the power of Christ to save 
all who come unto him. 

Richard Watson Gilder remembered his godly 
old grandfather on his death bed, murmuring as 
if in prayer meeting or class meeting phrases of 
Christian testimony and confidence, with much 
holy language, colored with the very life-blood 
of his soul, sanctifying his lips and ineffably 
dignifying his venerable countenance, as his 
spirit was entering Christ’s eternal glory. 

George John Romanes’ wisest, noblest, and 
most radiant phrase was “the hallowed glory 
of the Christian faith.” Nothing else so hallows, 
nothing brings so much glory. It was the bright 
shining of that glory that lit and lured him back 
from his dark, devious, distant intellectual 
vagrancies to kneel at the altar he had forsaken 
and take again the Holy Sacrament to his com- 
fort. 

The Religion of Life is the religion of great 
expectations; the expectation in this world of 
perfect love, ‘‘Christian perfection,” as it is 
called; the expectation in the world beyond of 
sharing in our Redeemer’s glory. The least and 
lowliest of those whom he loves and who trust in 
him may say with boldness and without presump- 
tion: 


48 MY GRAY GULL 


“Oh, to think, to step ashore, and that shore Heaven: 
To clasp a hand outstretched, and that God’s hand; 
To breathe new air, and that celestial air; 

To feel refreshed, and know it’s immortality. 
Oh, think, to pass from storm and stress 

To one unbroken calm; 

To wake and find it.glory.” 


“Your life is hid with Christ in God. When 
Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall 
ye also appear with him in glory.” 

Browning sings, in his high fashion, of “that 
vast realm of glory” of which we are aware even 
while we may not enter yet; the spiritual life 
beyond our earthly life, the law of which is 
known to us as is the law of this; and though our 
feet stay here, our heart and brain move there 
and are At home in Glory. So sang the most 
robustly affirmative poet of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the strongest singer since Shakespeare. 


iif 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN OF 
HUMAN SENTIMENTS 


LUTHER BURBANK, godfather and guardian 
angel of plants and fruits and flowers, says: 
“The child is the purest, truest thing in the 
world. Its life is stainless, sensitive, and re- 
sponsive to all impressions.” Dr. Lynn Harold 
Hough quotes a saying about James Barrie: 
“Most men grow up into manhood, but he grows 
down into a perpetual understanding of child- 
hood.” 

The more I know of childhood and motherhood, 
the more I stand in awe of them; they seem so 
near to God. In his later years the great Dutch 
artist Josef Israels turned from the complexi- 
ties of art which was largely artificial and fol- 
lowed instead the simplicities, mostly found in 
childhood. Art became to him, like Zechariah’s 
Jerusalem, a city of truth and innocence, “full 
of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.” 
When Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, an admirer of 
Israels, visited Holland and called upon him, the 
famous painter touched one of his own pictures 
of childhood fondly and said, “Except ye become 
as little children ye cannot enter into the king- 
dom of heaven.” Whoso is insensitive to the 
charm of childhood is more to be distrusted than 
“the man that hath no music in himself and is 

49 


50 MY GRAY GULL 


not moved by concord of sweet sounds,” pre- 
sumably “fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils,” 
thinks Shakespeare. 

That a man should take an interest, absorb- 
ing and intense, in his own children is inevi- 
table, universal, a matter of course. That men— 
we mean, especially, childless men—should take 
an interest, a sort of vicarious, poetic interest, in 
other people’s children is not unnatural nor un- 
lawful nor infrequent. 

In the flower garden of amiable human senti- 
ments the love for unrelated little children on 
the part of bachelors and other childless men is 
a flower not coarse, stiff, and unfragrant like a 
bachelor’s button, but, rather, like an orchid, air- 
fed, airy, and sweet, a delicate epiphytic bloom. 
Such friendships, born not of blood kinship but 
of spirit, fostered by esthetic sensibilities and 
fed by ethereal sentiments, are found blossoming 
even in the heart of such a man as Herbert 
Spencer, who speaks of one boarding house 
where, he says, “two little girls became the vicar- 
ious object of my philoprogenitive instincts.” 
The best thing in Victor Hugo and especially in 
Swinburne is their adoration of children. Of 
George Eliot’s story of “Totty” Swinburne 
wrote: “She is Totty forever and ever, a chubby 
immortal little child, set in the lap of our love 
for the kisses and laughter of all time.” One of 
many bad things in Gustave Flaubert was that 
he almost never mentioned or noticed children. 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN OL 


Swinburne’s cousin, Mrs. Leigh, tells of his 
veneration for them, his “simple worship of the 
pure beauty of childhood,” of which he left many 
exquisite records. The Bishop of London, Dr. 
Winnington Ingram, says that, not having chil- 
dren of his own, he seeks other people’s children 
to make happy and be made happy by: and in 
another child-loving bachelor of note, La 
Bruyere, through the whole texture of whose 
mature years was woven like a thread of gold 
an early memory of one young girl, with the re- 
sult, we are told, that ever after his regard for 
women took on the nature of a sort of noble 
fatherliness. This early friend of his was the 
bright little daughter of a book-seller and pub- 
lisher whose shop he frequented to turn over the 
new books and to learn what was going on and 
to play with the child. One day when he offered 
for publication the manuscript of his greatest 
work, he said to the publisher: “If you make 
anything from it, let the profits be given as a 
marriage portion to my little playmate here 
when she weds;” which resulted in the pub- 
lisher’s daughter receiving twenty thousand 
dollars at her marriage. Not always, however, is 
such altruistic authorship so profitable to the 
beneficiary. A gentleman appeared at the re- 
ceiving window of a Boston savings bank wish- 
ing to open a new account, and handed in a half 
dollar as the first deposit. ‘We do not open an 
account for so small an amount as that,” said the 


52 MY GRAY GULL 


teller. “But you must. I promised my little 
niece to deposit to her credit all the profits from 
my new book, and fifty cents is the amount up 
to date. You’ve got to help me keep my word. 
Youll surely do a little thing like that for a 
dear little girl.” And the bank opened the ac- 
count. 

Childless men, for their part, have the luxuri- 
ous advantage of enjoying the children light- 
heartedly without the burden of being respon- 
sible for them; while the contented parents, on 
their part, regard these friendships with amiable 
indulgence, undispleased, seeing perhaps some- 
thing a bit pathetic in the yearning fondness 
and romantic enthusiasm shown toward their 
children by such honorable susceptibles and 
usufructuaries. 

Dr. Joseph Collins, eminent neurologist and 
literary critic, thinks the soul of a little girl the 
best thing God has created. The tableau of the 
Big Man and the Little Girl has been set on 
many a stage the ages through. Friendship be- 
tween them, blending contrast and congeniality, 
is evidently on Nature’s program, divinely or- 
dained and provided for in the system of things. 
Notable instances, literally innumerable, embel- 
lish life and literature with indescribable beauty 
and irresistible charm. Among things honest, 
pure and lovely and of good report such pre- 
adolescent friendships play a delicate part in 
the forming of character and life. 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN D3 


In a photograph of the London city mission- 
ary, Rev. J. Gregory Mantle, we see him seated 
in the middle of a group of his mission children, 
four boys and one girl. He is pictured holding 
the little girl on his lap, with her arms around 
his neck. Why not one of the boys? Simply 
because he is a man and she is a little girl, and 
between the two Heaven has put a subtle, fra- 
grant, and everlasting attraction. If the mis- 
sionary were a woman one of the boys, probably 
the smallest, might be in her lap. That picture 
puts us among the primordial elements of life, 
the primitive forces which make the world go 
round, and the ground is as holy as the will of 
God. 

Under the same mystical spell is the curate 
in Thackeray’s delightful sketch, who, visiting 
the tenement region, finds in one small room 
three fatherless children whose mother is away 
all day at work. Elizabeth, aged ten, who acts 
as Hausmutter and takes care of the two 
younger, is so capable and so fine that the 
charmed curate says admiringly, “If I, too, were 
but ten years old and only three feet high, I 
would marry Elizabeth and we would go and live 
in a cupboard.” But he, alas, was thirty. 

Many a busy man can hear in the pauses of 
his action the horns of Elfland faintly blowing 
in some far border of his life. The spell of 
Esmeralda falls alike on Dom Claude, the priest, 
and on Clopin, King of the Beggars, and on 


54 MY GRAY GULL 


Quasimodo, the hunchback. Newspapers re- 
ported that General Gouraud, on Broadway, 
seemed more interested in an eight-year-old child 
smiling and reaching her hand, whom the Lion 
of the Argonne stooped to kiss, than in the sky- 
piercing Woolworth Building which was being 
shown him. 

History in many a spot is all aflit and afiutter 
with butterfly-like little creatures who lit on 
and were loved by great big men. There was 
wee Nancy with whom Lord Jeffrey, the terrible 
oger of the Edinburgh Review, used to romp, and 
to whom he wrote as ‘“My dear dimpled Pussie.”’ 
And there was the child, Thralia, whom ponder- 
ous old Dr. Sam Johnson called “Queenie,” and 
whom he described as “a bright, papilionaceous 
creature whom the elephant loves to play with 
and wave to and fro on his trunk.” It appears 
that the portentous polysyllabie biped, Doctor 
Johnson, shared the thick-skinned, and somewhat 
heavier four-legged elephant’s affection for 
Queenie, and thus this little human butterfly 
had the felicity of being played with by two 
elephantine creatures at once. 

And there was lovely, demure little Penelope 
Boothby, whom Sir Joshua Reynolds painted 
lovingly in her mob cap, and whose spirit went 
to join the immortals soon after the great artist 
immortalized her sweet face and slight figure 
with his brush. And there forever is Sir Walter 
Scott’s “Pet Marjorie,’ dear to thousands, whose 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 5D 


affection was aS warm as her genius was preco- 
cious and her piety genuine, and whose memory 
blossoms from her dust with undiminished fra- 
grance after a century. 

And there was shy little Clara Novello’s happy 
friendship with Charles Lamb, who was often 
in her father’s house. Once the child, to avoid 
being sent off to bed before supper when he was 
there, hid herself in a cupboard by the piano 
and fell asleep. Waking and coming out of hid- 
ing, she was severely reprimanded by her mother 
in the presence of the visitor; but Lamb pleaded 
for her and obtained the parental consent that 
whenever he came to supper the child should be 
allowed to remain up with the family. So when- 
ever he was there she had Lamb for supper. He 
addressed her in his letter as “Saint Clara.” In 
retaliation she might have Latinized him and 
called him Saint Agnus. Once when her father 
made her sing for Lamb, and she was doing her 
best, her stuttering friend stopped her by cry- 
ing out with a feigned look of suffering, “O 
Clara, d-d-don’t make that d-d-dreadful noise 
any more. For m-m-mercy’s sake, d-d-don’t.” 
This child, writing of him in years long after, 
said, “O glory and delight. How I did love dear 
Charles Lamb!” With similar recollections of 
George Meredith one woman wrote after his 
death: “I first saw him when I was seven years 
old. He and I were great friends in those days. 
He was a splendid playfellow.” 


56 MY GRAY GULL 


The daughter of a London clergyman has told 
what a good playfellow she and her sisters had 
in Sydney Smith. She remembers his frequent 
coming to her father’s dinners, and says: “He 
would arrive ten minutes too soon, run up to the 
nursery at the top of the house, take a small 
girl on each knee, and delight to expend on a few 
little children, and the baby crowing for joy of 
life in a cot in the corner, the inimitable drollery 
and the stream of irresistible cleverness and: non- 
sense which only the night before, perhaps, had 
been the piéce de résistance of the dinner at Hol- 
land House. One of the little girls still recollects 
—better even than the sweets in his pocket—the 
bonhomie and kindness of the shrewd, manly 
face and knows that Sydney Smith’s wit was 
not his finest quality.” 

A talented woman of wide and varied ex- 
perience, looking back through many eventful 
years, sees herself a little child riding around 
Clifton Springs on the big shoulders of that 
burly Saint Sagacity, Dr. Henry Foster, founder 
and builder of the place. She remembers that 
her ambition was to build a house of snow large 
enough for him to crawl into on hands and 
knees like a great brown bear. Remembering 
gratefully these and many other things, this 
woman in her maturity says, “He certainly was 
a Sweet friend for a little girl to have.” 

An English woman tells of the happy play she 
used to have with Thackeray. Once when he 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN ot 


was sitting in a large Louis Philippe armchair 
in Paris, she, a little girl, perched on the arm of 
his chair and quizzed the great man thus: 

“Ts you good?” 

“Not so good as I should like to be,” answered 
Thackeray. 

“Is you clever?” 

“Well, ’'ve written a book or two. Perhaps I 
am rather clever.” 

“Is you pretty?” 

“O, no, no! No, No, No, NO!” roared the big 
fellow with an explosive burst of laughter. 

“Well, I think you is good and clever and 
pretty,” cooed the innocent little diplomat, cutely 
winding that famous celebrity around her tiny 
finger with predatory intent, because she re- 
membered some bonbons he had bought for her 
on the boulevard yesterday, and because she had 
visions of more bonbons which her well-tamed 
and benevolent giant, if wisely managed and 
kept in a good humor, might buy for her to-mor- 
row. Even Thackeray’s masterpiece, Henry 
Esmond, is not quite so precious to this English 
woman as her memories of her own child-play 
with him. 

The Marchesa Perruzzi gives us charming 
reminiscences of the children in the Barberini 
Palace in Rome who were visited and played 
with by Hans Christian Andersen and Robert 
Browning; the gaunt, ungainly Norwegian poet 
of childhood romping uproariously over tables 


58 MY GRAY GULL 


and chairs, and cutting out grotesque paper but- 
terflies and clowns and fairies; and then Robert 
Browning reading later his “Pied Piper of 
Hamelin” to those enviable children while Hans 
Andersen listened to the reading with boyish de- 
light, his ugly face brimming with fun. 

Among the powers that be on this much-gov- | 
erned planet is there any such potentate as the 
child? The strongest and the greatest bow down 
at the touch of the scepter of this diminutive 
despot. Biography and autobiography are full 
of confession and proof that all through history 
many who sat in the seats of the mighty were 
powerless under the all-subduing touch of tiny 
fingers. Even old Plutarch, in his famous Lives, 
shows that, amid the eventful and momentous 
procedures of empire and war and heroism, a 
child’s hand secretly holds him by the heart. In 
a crevice of his picturesque pages we find a refer. 
ence to his own little girl and to her anxiety that 
her dolls should share the professional atten- 
tions of the nurse: and from that tender mention 
we know more of the inmost soul of Plutarch 
than from any of his great writings, far more 
than from his pictures of Cesar in the Senate 
House facing the gleaming steel of murderous 
conspirators, or from his descriptions of 
wounded Pyrrhus darting at the foe a look which 
struck terror, or from his picture of Sylla’s white 
charger plunging with his rider safely past the 
thrusting spears. The world over and the ages 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 59 


through, many men of might and mastery have 
known hours when the sweet lips and clinging 
arms of a warm, trusting, cuddling child meant 
more to them than all “the boast of heraldry 
and pomp of power.”’ Mrs. Sellar pictures W. E. 
Henley, big, rugged-looking, florid, shaggy like 
a bear, “a strange, tempestuous, robustious fel- 
low” George Meredith called him, abjectly and 
blissfully enslaved to the will of his own preco- 
cious four-year-old, whose mien was so imperial 
that she was called ‘‘The Empress” by artists who 
went down from London to see the child again 
and again in her brief seven years of life, pitiably 
brief because doomed by the deadly disease which 
her father had and which he knowingly trans- 
mitted to her before her birth. What right has a 
man to do that? How dare he do it? God pity 
him! 

We remember that Edwin Booth had a friend- 
ship with a small daughter of a friend of his. 
His birthday came on the same date with hers, 
so the two called themselves twins. On the day 
when he was fifty and she six, she sent him 
flowers with this message: “Dear Mr. Booth, we 
are fifty-six to-day.” Across the gulf of a life 
time the big man and the little girl hailed each 
other as comrades, and both found pleasure in it. 
To him it was freshening and rejuvenating. 
When to dry or rheumy eyes the world grows 
dim and darkling, the man says mentally to the 
little child: 


60 MY GRAY GULL 


“T see the morning of the world in you. 
I see life upward springing, 
Light round you clinging. 
And in your eyes the dew.” 


I know how Edwin Booth felt, for I too have a 
Twin: I was born auburn-haired in a Plainfield, 
N. J., parsonage on February 18, 1843. Exactly 
sixty years after, on February 13, a baby girl 
was born auburn-haired in a Plainfield parson- 
age. On my eighty-third birthday my Girl Twin 
sent me a message. She might have said, “We 
are 146 to-day.” 

We are told that John Ruskin at the age of 
forty succumbed to the blandishments of a little 
Irish girl of nine, named Rose La Touche, who 
is described as looking like “a little sister of 
Christ.” The first time Ruskin met her she 
“gave him her hand as a good dog gives its paw.” 
Later he gave her lessons in art. Quite pretty 
herself, she candidly told him she considered 
him very ugly. She christened him “Crumpet,” 
which, when she discovered his goodness and 
gentleness, she mitigated into “Saint Crumpet.” 
This friendship ripened into love on his part, 
and became the one central and absorbing fact 
of his inner life, so that in after years he wrote: 
“Rosie was always in my heart, and everything 
I did was for her.’ This was the deepest pas- 
sion of Ruskin’s life, and her final rejection of 
his love because he was not religious enough was 
the deepest sorrow that ever devastated his days. 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 61 


Few men have been more susceptible to the 
charm of feminine childhood than Dr. John 
Brown, of Edinburgh. When he was a young 
physician he wrote in a letter to a friend: “I am 
going out to Callands to-day to be all alone in the 
open air on the common road for a full-length 
think with myself; and to see a three-year bairn, 
the daughter of a plowman and a perfect image 
of sweet wildness. I wish you could see her with 
her long eye-lashes and unfathomable eyes, and 
her eerie black blink; you would then under- 
stand my love for her. I have wandered days 
with her among the hills, leading her by the hand, 
and every now and then asking her to open wide 
her eyes that I might stare into their depths. 
She will kiss nobody in the world but her mother, 
father, brothers, sisters, and me.” No wonder 
young Doctor Brown went strutting off, so elate 
and proud, on the road to Callands. It was the 
same Doctor Brown who told later the fascinat- 
ing and touching story of that wonder-child 
Marjorie Fleming, concerning which Dr. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes wrote to its author: “I have 
read and reread and read aloud to my wife that 
infinitely tearful, smileful, soulful, tender, 
caressing story of Pet Marjorie. Dear little 
soul! And the picture of great big hearty Sir 
Walter Scott wrapping the wee creature in his 
plaid and striding off with her. If only that 
fragment of your writings were saved from the 
wreck of English literature, men and women 


62 MY GRAY GULL 


would cry over it. That surpassingly sweet 
story is told so lovingly and vividly that blessed 
little Marjorie becomes our own child, our 
‘ownty-downty,’ as New England nursery small- 
talk has it.” ; 

Mark Twain, too, succumbed to the story, and 
joined the procession of Pet Marjorie’s admirers 
many years after her death. This admiration 
reached its climax in connection with her 
detestation of the multiplication table, concern- 
ing which she said: “I am now going to tell you 
the horrible and wretched plaege [plague] that 
my multiplication gives me. You can’t conceive 
it the most devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 
7 it is what nature itself can’t endure.” “In the 
presence of that holy verdict,” said Mark Twain 
with ancient and lifelong grudge, “I stand rev- 
erently uncovered.” 

A charming picture has been given us of Ed- 
ward FitzGerald, translator of the “Rubdiyat” 
of Omar Khayyam, coming out of his garden gate 
one day in England, tall and dignified, to inter- 
cept and make obeisance to an equally dignified 
Sweet maiden, aged three, who was passing by. 
She confidently trusted her tiny dimpled hand to 
the grasp of his long fingers: but when he asked 
her name she met his inquiry with a gentle but 
firm taciturnity. “A very discreet young lady,” 
Said the stately scholar while they faced each 
other as equals, her nonage and innocence bal- 
ancing his age and learning, as if his had been 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 63 


the Royal Presence and she the fairest débutante 
of her year. 

Everywhere feminine childhood appeals to 
manly men. Chivalry, gallantry and courtesy 
(words contributed by the French to our Eng- 
lish language) go to sea on the bridge and in 
the forecastle. John Masefield and Joseph Con- 
rad report knighthood in flower on the rolling 
deep. In the alarming moment when the order 
is “Man the boats” gallantry is grim: “Women 
and children first” is the stern command, en- 
forced if need be with fists or revolvers. In 
happy moments of “Eight bells and all’s well” 
gallantry is genial. “What do you do in cloudy 
weather when you cannot see the sun?” asked a 
young girl on her first sea voyage, watching the 
officers take the noonday observation. 

“QO, then,” answered the bronzed captain, look- 
ing into the eager young face, “then we take our 
observations from little girls’ eyes.” 

Into her bright eyes I first looked when they 
were three years old—a very long time ago: they 
are brighter than ever now with the joy of a beau- 
tiful married life. : 

One of T. E. Brown’s exquisite poems tells 
how a man met in a country lane a little child 
who smiled at him with a look so full of trust 
and happiness that he blessed her in his heart. 
The wee creature knew him not, but laughed up 
into his face out of the natural joy that bubbled 
in her veins. And her laugh seemed to say: 


64 MY GRAY GULL 


“The heaven is bright above us; 

And there is God to love us; 

And I am but a little gleeful maid, 

And thou art big and old and staid; 

But the blue hills have made thee mild 
As is a little child, 

Wherefore I laugh that thou may’st see, 
O laugh, O laugh with me.” 


And the laughter of the little gleeful girl made 
the country lane a more royal road than the 
king’s highway. 

Proof of the preciousness of a child’s favor is 
found in the fact that parents consider their 
child’s kiss the most delicate honor they can 
bestow upon a friend, and the recipient accepts 
it as a dainty gift. A yet more sacred honor is 
when they ask a minister to lay his hands in bap- 
tism on their baby’s head. 

One summer evening at children’s bedtime a 
lovely young mother sent little Harold and 
Madeleine across the parlor of the old Water 
Gap House above the Delaware River to give 
“Good night” to the pastor who a few years be- 
fore had married her to one of his finest young 
men. The pastor was sensitively aware that in 
granting him her children’s lips to kiss, she 
offered an exquisite and reverent token of the 
family’s affection. The loveliness of those sweet 
children touched the close of that Sabbath day 
with tender sanctity, went with him to his pil- 
low and lingers still. Dr. Francis Thompson 
says, “I kissed in them the heart of childhood, so 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 65 


divine for me. If in Eden as on earth we be, I 
shall keep younger company.” 

One winter a frequenter of that choice resort, 
Albert A. LeRoy’s Pine Tree Inn, Lakehurst, 
New Jersey, known as the “Winter Mohonk,” 
was keeping to his room there a few days as a 
precaution, his caputal affairs being in process 
of liquidation. Into his soppy seclusion and 
moist misery, about nine o’clock one evening a 
young mother, born altruistic in a missionary’s 
home in Japan, brought her seven-years-old 
Dorothy to give that lone greyhead a good-night 
kiss. When he rose from his chair to receive the 
unexpected honor, it was deplorably evident that 
he was not kissable. Seeing his uninviting and 
unhappy predicament, the wise child smiled up 
at him and said, “I can’t kiss oo ’cause oo got 
the gwip. I give oo a telegwaph kiss,” and she 
reached her tiny hand up to the big tall man, 
while he, understanding her motion and bending 
down, took hold of her tiny finger-tips with his, 
Dorothy explaining to his dull comprehension, 
“The kiss goes up.” Then with rippling laughter 
the merry little mite flitted out, leaving the sur- 
prised and shaken man to his convulsions, his 
explosions and his handkerchiefs, in a saturated 
solution of solitude, albeit all aquiver with un- 
wonted ecstasy. In his life such angel visits 
had been few and far between, and memory still 
cherishes gratefully through the years a vision 
of that enchanting, wingless cherub in white 


se 


66 MY GRAY GULL 


nighties standing atiptoe with upreaching 
fingers, saying, “I give oo a telegwaph kiss,” she 
and her mother framed in the refined setting of 
that homelike Inn in the Jersey Pines; a fine 
winter health resort to weary guests, 

At Gettysburg in July, 1918, the survivors held 
a reunion fifty years after the fight. When Jesse 
Bowman Young (gallant soldier and brilliant 
author of a great book on the Battle of Gettys- 
burg, recognized by West Point as one of the 
most accurate, competent and complete accounts 
of that decisive conflict) met on the battlefield 
the man who had been his closest comrade dur- 
ing the awful three days fight, he was overcome 
by his emotions. Unable to express his feelings 
in any other way, Doctor Young called to his 
daughter: “Anne, come here. I want you to kiss 
this man for me’—the most tender and convine- 
ing token of affection he could give to his old 
companion in arms. 

Our acute friends the psychologists have not 
yet fully explained all the mysterious movements 
of that curious machine the human mind. In 
many ways we are fearfully and wonderfully 
made and curiously wrought in our inward parts, 
in the secret places of our nature. As inexplic- 
able as they are unpredictable, for example, are 
memory’s discriminations and preferences. Who 
can explain for us that pretty little idyll of the 
Alps given by an English poet in the London 
Spectator? 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 67 


“In Switzerland one idle day, 
As on the grass at noon we lay, 
Came a grave peasant child, and stood 
Watching us strangers eat our food, 
And what we offered her she took 
In silence, with her quiet look, 
And when we rose to go, content, 
Without a word of thanks, she went. 


“Another day in sleet and rain, 
T chose that meadow path again, 
And, partly turning, chanced to see 
My little quest friend watching me 
With eyes half hidden by her hair, 
Blowing me kisses, unaware 
That I had seen, and still she wore 
The same grave aspect as before. 


“Now, some recall for heart’s delight 
A sunrise, some a snowy height, 
But I a little child who stands 
And gravely kisses both her hands.” 


That is the poem simple and sweet; and now, 
who will tell us why a Swiss peasant child throw- 
ing coy kisses at a stranger outlasts in his 
memory all the majesty and sublimity of the 
Alps, their red sunrises and their snowy heights? 

A burly and striking figure in our day is 
Gilbert K. Chesterton, journalist, littérateur, 
polemic, and elephantine champion of orthodoxy, 
who buffets and jollies infidels, convicting them 
of credulity, myopia, and strabismus; whose 
jovial good-nature is dangerous as a playful 
lion’s paw; whose encounters with the enemy 
take on the semblance of a solemn frolic and 


68 MY GRAY GULL 


whose temper toward deniers of the evangelic 
faith is like that of Kipling’s Tommy Atkins to- 
ward Fuzzy Wuzzy. 

So muscular a protagonist would scarcely be 
expected to lapse. into sentimental memory- 
freaks, yet his heavy fist writes an entire poem 
solely to say that if he ever revisits Baltimore, 
his mind will dwell not on memories of stately 
occasions or famous men, not on Lord Baltimore 
who gave his name to the place, nor on Lee and 
his heroes of the South who called their land by 
the lovely name of “Dixie” in the unforgotten 
song. Let him tell what he will do: 


“Tf ever I cross the sea and stray 
To that city of Maryland, 
I will sit on a stone and watch or pray 
For a stranger’s child that was there one day: 
And the child will never come back to play, 
And no one will understand.” 


But we all do understand. Mr. Chesterton is 
in the grip of one of nature’s universals, not a 
weakness but a recrudescence of pure pristine 
innocence, and his personal confession exposes 
the rest of us as well. As the Indian chief said 
to his tribe when Columbus came ashore, “It is 
all over with us; we are discovered.” Absurd 
as seems that ponderous Englishman’s picture of 
himself sitting alone on a stone and watching 
prayerfully for a remembered child that will 
never come back to play with him again, he is 
yet and thereby fit model for a massive me- 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 69 


morial of the fondness of the Big Man for the 
Little Girl. 

On a winter night many years ago, a man went 
to spend an evening in one of the best homes 
in the world. As to the furniture, the pictures 
on the wall, what was for supper, how many 
were at table, what the evening’s conversation 
was, what his sermons were about the Sunday 
before or the Sunday after, whom he married or 
buried that week, he does not remember: to try 
to recall any of these things would be like fish- 
ing in the river Lethe for forgotten fishes. But 
that, when he was let in from the wintry street 
to the glowing warmth and welcome of that 
lovely home, a little brown-haired sprite, intense 
with the fervency known only to feminine child- 
hood, flew to meet him, leaped clear off the floor 
into his arms, and hit him a bumper kiss square 
on the mouth—this he has never forgotten. She 
came like a flying wedge and hit the line hard, 
and the glad abandon, velocity, onset, and impact 
of that impetuous child are dented deep in the 
phonograph record of memory revolving now 
under his white hairs. Noting the whimsical 
way in which unthrifty memory drops a multi- 
tude of momentous things and then treasures 
seeming trifles, T. B. Aldrich wrote: 


“My mind lets go a thousand things 
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings, 
And yet recalls the very hour— 
*Twas noon by yonder village tower, 


70 MY GRAY GULL 


And on the last blue noon in May— 
The wind came briskly up this way, 
Crisping the brook beside the road ; 
Then pausing here, set down its load 
Of pine scents, and shook listlessly 
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.” 


But when it comes to memorable precious- 
ness, what are two wind-plucked wild-rose petals 
thrown down upon the ground, compared to two 
rose-petal human lips tossed up against yours on 
the wild sweet flying impulse of a child’s impetu- 
ous love? Roses are fine flowers, but tiny two- 
lips have been reckoned sweeter—as George 
Meredith was aware when he pictured in his 
song of “Angelic Love,” | 


“The sweet little dewy mouth 
Tenderly uplifted, 
Like two rose leaves drifted 
On the warm balmy breath of the sunny South ;” 


and Aldrich when he said that “to have known 
a child’s kiss makes existence worth while;” and 
Mrs. Browning when she wrote, “A child’s kiss 
on thy lips shall make thee glad.” 

Doubtless Whittier forgot in later years many 
a lesson that he‘learned from books at the little 
schoolhouse amid the New England hills; but 
one imperishable recollection of school-boy days 
for him was of a little golden-haired girl who 
shyly laid her hand on his outside the country 
schoolhouse door one day, and the poet tells us 
what she said to him: 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN T1 


“T’m sorry that I spelt the word; 
I hate to go above you, 
Because”—the brown eyes lower fell— 
“Because, you see, I love you.” 


And memory kept showing her sweet child-face 
and repeating her tender words to the gray- 
haired bachelor man when the grasses had been 
growing on her grave forty years. 

An habitual visitor to Clifton Springs Sani- 
tarium cannot remember the chapter nor the 
hymn used in the chapel on a certain morning. 
All that he remembers is the thin, pure, birdlike 
voice of little Allegra, who held the other side of 
his book, piping up in the hymn, her high treble 
sounding in the heavy volume of older voices 
like the tinkle of a harp threading its way 
through the great organ-roll, or the voice of a 
violin singing like a mounting lark above the 
swelling orchestra. 

Will the wise professor of psychology kindly 
explain how it happens that, out of one long-ago 
summer spent by a certain man beside the sea, 
the one thing most vividly and indelibly remem- 
bered is a child’s laugh—the most musical, 
indeed, the one perfect laugh ever heard by him? 
All the words of all the wise men at Doctor 
Deems’ Summer School of Philosophy, which met 
near by, with Borden P. Bowne as chief lecturer, 
are “gone glimmering through the dream of 
things that were,” lost in “the backward and 
abysm of time,” but that exquisite incomparable 


q2 MY GRAY GULL 


laugh still rings like a silver bell in this man’s 
memory. It was the one irresistible, superlative 
charm of the house, as it rang clear through the 
parlors, and along the porches, and by the tum- 
bling breakers and the crawling seafoam. The 
ecstasy of that little three-year-old girl made all 
the hired orchestras and entertainers of the 
summer seem cheap and poor as a boy’s jewsharp 
in comparison with Ole Bull’s Stradivarius. To 
hear Gracie Kudlich’s laugh in summer morn- 
ings was to understand something of Charles 
Kingsley’s feeling in his verse: 
“The merry, merry lark was up and singing, 
And the hare was out and feeding on the lea, 


And the merry, merry bells below were ringing, 
When my child’s laugh rang through me.” 


The psychologist has not explained us yet. We 
are still a mystery to ourselves, and even to him 
with all his penetration, lore, and insight. As 
for that unspeakable Freud, he gropes like “a 
pore, benighted ’eathen” among the sanctities of 
human nature. 

When a certain big man confesses a fondness 
for little girls it is for several valid and respect- 
able reasons. In the first place he owes his life 
to a little girl. The way of it was this: Two 
children, a boy aged three and a girl aged seven, 
wandered unobserved one summer afternoon out 
through the back gate and across a field to a 
mill-race along the margin of which they played 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 73 


until the boy fell into the water. The girl, in- 
stead of losing her head and running off to the 
house leaving him to drown, coolly followed 
along the bank, till she could catch hold of his 
clothes and pull him out of the swift current 
which was hurrying the baby boy on to be 
pounded and drowned under the buckets of the 
big mill-wheel. This is why one man cannot see 
a mill-race or an old fashioned grist-mill or the 
big water-wheel at Ponce de Leon Springs, with- 
out some kindly thoughts toward little girls. A 
literary critic, commenting on the number of 
good women in De Morgan’s novels, says that in 
his books salvation often takes a feminine form. 
It surely did in that small boy’s case. 

In the next place, the same man when a child 
had for close and constant comrade a sister, 
Julia Isabella, two years younger than himself, 
to whom he was playmate, guide, protector, may- 
hap at times tease and tormentor, and to whom 
he dedicates this book. In the happy hunting- 
srounds of childhood, the wonderland of 
preadolescent years, the boy and his little 
sister, living in the old Woodrow parsonage 
which stands between the woods on the west 
and the graveyard on the east, rambled and 
played in both, hunting nuts and wintergreen 
and sassafras and birch and penny-royal in the 
woods, and wild flowers and wild strawberries in 
the burying-ground. They knew where the best 
hickory-nut and chestnut trees were in the woods 


74 MY GRAY GULL 


and the most fertile and fruitful spots in the 
churchyard. A secure little Eden that country 
parsonage was. Its nearest neighbors were the 
harmless buried people lying so quiet in God’s 
acre just over the fence; and the road in front 
was safe, for it was before the days of tramps 
and automobiles. Across the road lived Uncle 
Moses Winant, the sexton and grave-digger, on 
whose small farm, near the road, was a little 
pond where his horses and cows were watered, 
the boy being sometimes permitted to ride a 
horse to water; and some half-wild apple trees, 
the spicy fruit of which the boy tastes to this 
day; and some gentle hill-slopes, fine for the boy 
to coast down with his little sister on his sled 
when snow-banks billowed the fields. Toward 
Uncle Mose’s apple trees the boy has now some 
such feeling as C. P. Cranch expresses in the lines 
which describe two middle-aged men pausing 
under a mulberry tree, and as they plucked and 
ate, one Says: 


“Do you know, old friend, I haven’t eaten 
A mulberry since the ignorant joy 
Of something sweet in the mouth could sweeten 
All this bitter world for a boy.” 


Without rime or reason it happens in these late 
years that whenever that Woodrow boy recalls 
Uncle Mose digging graves in the churchyard he 
remembers Faber’s lines about the old laborer 
and grave-digger: 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN (6 


“Fiver his downcast eye 
Was laughing silently 
As if he found some jubilee in thinking. 
For his one thought was God, 
In that one thought he abode, 
Forever in that thought more deeply sinking. 


“And thus he lived his life, 
A kind of gentle strife, 
Upon the God within his soul relying. 
Men left him all alone 
Because he was unknown; 
But he heard the angels sing when he was dying.” 


The boy and his sister were no more afraid of 
the green-billowed, white head-stoned burying 
ground, even at night, than little Celia Laighton 
on the Isle of Shoals was afraid of the billowy 
sea, whose waves and coasts were her playground 
and its creatures of wing and of fin her play- 
mates. Graves had no sadness for that boy and 
girl, for they had not reached the age nor even 
imagined the mood in which people say: 

“The mossy marbles rest 
On the lips that I have pressed 
In their bloom. 
And the names I loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 
On the tomb.” 
The Woodrow woods were full of the fascination 
of ferns and thickets and water-pools, the haunts 
of birds and squirrels and rabbits and frogs. In 
the low ground back of the barn where the large 
black-berries grew on tall bushes, the fearless 
children often found and fondled prettily marked 


76 MY GRAY GULL 


little snakes, and now and then had the shivery 
excitement of seeing a big black snake, five or 
six feet in length, saunter across the path or 
crawl away to his hole. 

It was a paradise full of what Marjorie Flem- 
ing’s diary called “rurel filisity.” With woods 
and a graveyard to play in, what more could chil- 
dren want? Out of full memories of those blithe, 
innocent, and haleyon days this man testifies 
gratefully that a little sister is a lovely thing for 
a boy to have. This man can understand Sidney 
Lanier’s feeling toward his little sister Gertrude, 
who, Lanier says, represented to him “the serene 
purity of the Winged Folk up Yonder.” Of his 
own little sister this man can remember nothing 
but what is sweet and lovely and dear. But he 
sometimes wonders timorously whether he was 
so good a brother to her that she, now more than 
fifty years in heaven, would say: 


“But were another childhood world my share, 
I would be born a little sister there.” 


Professor Beers, of Yale, looking at a bust of 
Thackeray, aged fourteen, said, “That boy is a 
cruel tease; I would not want to be his little 
sister.” A certain man—not this one—tells us 
that he cannot be comfortable in the presence of 
@& moss rose, because it makes him remember a 
day when his little sister had such a rose and 
he took it away from her by force of bigger 
muscles, heedless of her tearful beseechings. And 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN (us 


then she flung her arms around him and con- 
sented he should have it, and laughed at her own 
tears, and wept again when he kissed her, a kiss, 
one almost thinks, little better than Judas’. 
The boy behaved like a robber and the girl be- 
haved like an angel; and he hates himself and the 
moss rose when it makes him remember his little 
sister’s tears and her love and her laughter in the 
morning of life’s day, and the more so when he 
thinks of the night that fell thereafter when the 
light of her face was withdrawn forever from 
the world. That the man who in childhood was 
saved from drowning by a little girl and whose 
boyhood was blessed by the comradeship of a 
little sister, and who writes this monograph, 
should have, all his life, a good opinion of little 
girls can surprise nobody. 

The town of Westfield, New York, holds one 
unique historic memory which it should pre- 
serve imperishably. One February day in 1861 
the people of that town saw the tall, gaunt figure 
of Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington 
to be inaugurated President and to take up the 
heaviest burden ever laid on American shoulders, 
standing on the rear platform of his train which 
had paused at Westfield. After he had spoken 
briefly to the gathered citizens, he asked if little 
Grace Bedell was there, and when she was 
brought forward he said: “You see, Grace, I’ve 
let my beard grow to please you”; and then he 
reached for the child with his long arms and 


78 MY GRAY GULL 


gave her a kiss as his train moved off. This 
child, a total stranger, seeing his pictures in the 
papers, after his nomination and before his elec- 
tion, had written him a letter, telling him she 
thought his picture would look better with a 
beard, and that if he would grow one she would 
try to persuade her two brothers to vote for him, 
though they were Democrats. The great Presi- 
dent, whose purpose a million armed men could 
not shake and whom plots of assassination could 
not swerve, had been swayed by the wish of an 
artless child. Why should not the town of West- 
field, possessing this unduplicated incident, per- 
petuate in bronze or marble this tender act of 
the tallest, ruggedest, and gentlest of America’s 
great ones, bending to the touch of candid and 
confiding childhood, the topmost man on earth, 
uncrowned king of fifty millions, who, in the 
most solemn, perilous journey of his life, with 
the gaze of a nation of friends and foes fixed on 
him, was not above repeating on the stage of 
history the beautiful oft-repeated spectacle of 
the Big Man and the Little Girl? Of such a 
statue Westfield could forever be proud, as New- 
ark, New Jersey, is of Borglum’s seated bronze 
Lincoln on ground level, accessible to the crowd 
before the Courthouse on the low bench around 
which children love to cluster. On pleasant 
afternoons the passer-by may see them sitting by 
Lincoln’s side looking wonderingly into his deep 
eyes, or nestling against his breast, or standing 


AN ORCHID IN THE GARDEN 79 


on his huge knees, coiling their arms around his 
long neck, and stroking the weary face. It is 
the finest sight in the city. This typical story is 
told. One Sunday afternoon a dark-skinned 
alien with his two children was seen standing 
near the bench, gazing reverently at the rugged 
figure, while his own Americanized public-school 
children told their foreign father what they knew 
of Lincoln. At last, in response to their request, 
the man drew nearer and lifted up each of the 
two by turns. The boy stroked the patient face 
admiringly, his own face glowing as if the liv- 
ing Lincoln had spoken to him. The little girl 
put her slender arms around Lincoln’s neck and 
gently kissed his cheek, a spectacle immensely 
promotive of patriotism, keeping alive reverence 
and faith in mankind, educative alike to native 
and foreign-born in the ideals for which the 
greatest of republics stands. Westfield, too, 
should have its bronze Lincoln, on ground-level 
or near it, for its children to revere, love, and 
caress through endless generations. 

By the verdict of twenty centuries the supreme 
figure in human history is the Man of Galilee; 
called even by a modern agnostic “the overtower- 
ing intellectual giant of all the ages” ; recognized 
with something of awe even by a voluptuary like 
De Maupassant as “surely the finest intelligence 
and the most perfect nature ever seen on earth” ; 
declared by England’s foremost literary neo- 
pagan to have proved his transcendent goodness 


80 MY GRAY GULL 


and greatness in the unparalleled words, “Suffer 
the little children to come unto me, and forbid 
them not, for to such belongeth the kingdom of 
God :” who took them up in’ his arms, put his 
hands upon them and blessed them, perceiving 
their beauty and*their innocence. In the midst 
of ambitious men questioning who should be 
greatest in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus held up 
a child before them for contrast and reproof, and 
said: “Except ye turn and become as little chil- 
dren ye shall not even enter the kingdom of 
heaven.” Awe-struck evangelists, painters, 
sculptors, poets, preachers, never cease showing 
us that all-surpassing and supreme Figure, 
majestic in his greatness, standing at Caper- 
naum beside the Galilean lake with a little child 
in his arms. 

And the greatest friend little children and 
their mothers have ever had in the world is that 
childless Man of Galilee, the holy, beautiful and 
gracious son of Mary, the Eternal Son of God. 


IV 
MINETTA BROOK 


ROUGHLY speaking, old New York was built 
upon the back of a petrified alligator, over six- 
teen miles long, nose at Spuyten Duyvil junc- 
tion of Harlem and Hudson Rivers, haunches 
at Battery, Governor’s Island at start of tail, 
Robbins Reef perhaps at tip. In the glacial 
period Philadelphia, then as now warmer than 
New York, was basking in the sun when the 
rocky isle of Manhattan was under ice a thou- 
sand feet deep. When glaciers withdrew on their 
northward way to clear a place for William 
Osler to be born in a Canadian parsonage and to 
get Labrador ready for Wilfred Grenfell, numer- 
ous immortal streamlets were left flowing 
through gashes which creased the alligator’s 
back. 

One of the least of these, springing deep down 
under Twentieth Street between Theodore Roose- 
velt’s birthplace and The Methodist Book Con- 
cern, flows southward under the Fifth Avenue 
region through and beyond Washington Square, 
once a marsh, and empties into the Hudson at the 
foot of Charlton Street. In early maps of New 
Amsterdam it was a brook twelve feet wide with 
good fishing at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. 

81 


82 MY GRAY GULL 


When Washington Square was a Potter’s Field 
over a century ago, it washed paupers’ bones long 
before it watered the roots of great elms and 
sycamores, which were the glory of later and still 
remembered years. The original Dutch settlers 
christened it Mintje Kill. When the British Ad- 
miral, Sir Peter Warren, came and obtained a 
grant of two hundred acres including it, its name 
was changed to Minetta Brook. In those years 
it was the source of water supply for the dwellers 
on its banks. This tiny rivulet, its infancy 
hidden under a great man’s cradle, is itself 
among the Powers that Be. Buried alive, it is 
yet as free and irresistible as the Switzer’s tor- 
rents that leap his rocks and plow his valleys 
without asking leave. Reigning hierarchies, 
pontifical or political, or both in one, on Fiftieth 
or Fourteenth Street, are as the idle wind which 
it regards not. <A preposterous cacique of 
Greater New York, surnamed Hylan, could pun- 
ish five enraged millions for electing him mayor 
by preventing for seven years sorely needed sub- 
ways, but could not interfere one moment with 
Minetta’s subways. Weak as water it is as re- 
sistless as Niagara. It does not even “pander 
to the moral sentiments” of an exasperated 
public as Boss Fernando Wood, one of Gotham’s 
Great Moguls, found it prudent to do. Tables of 
stone with the Ten Commandments graven 
thereon would not block its way. Its ultimatum 
is as decisive as Lloyd Garrison’s “I will not 


MINETTA BROOK 83 


compromise; I will not retreat a single inch,” or 
Unconditional Surrender Grant’s to Buckner at 
Fort Donaldson. To all who obstruct its pas- 
sage it says: “I move upon your works imme- 
diately. Give me right of way or I will flood 
your cellars, undermine your foundations, make 
your buildings uninhabitable.’ (In 1924 a 
theater on Forty-second Street and a Broadway 
café were startled by a similar stream bursting 
up through their floors from unknown depths 
unannounced and resistless. ) 

This subterranean brooklet dictates terms to 
every building erected on or near its course. 
With the aid of my Little Gold Girl, since then 
gone to heaven, I examined the one put up in 
1923 at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street and 
found it resting on seventy concrete piles, hard 
as granite, more durable than iron, intended to 
give free course for Minetta Water to sweep or 
seep around them and go on its way unhindered. 
This redoubtable and vengeful rivulet promul- 
gates its own Monroe Doctrine, loaded to the 
muzzle. “Keep your distance, make way,” is the 
order. It behooves Dr. Elmer E. Brown, chan- 
ecellor of New York University, to maintain 
amicable diplomatic relations on Washington 
Square with this tiny but truculent trickle. The 
mighty must stand at salute to receive orders 
from the minute. “Halt” cries voiceless Mineitta, 
if even a huge over-towering university tres- 
passes. 


84 MY GRAY GULL 


New York’s multimillions tramping overhead 
are unaware of this omnipotent little despot. 
Street signs in old Greenwich Village section, 
“Minetta Street” and “Minetta Lane,” alone re- 
mind the multitudes of its existence, known 
otherwise chiefly to builders and street commis- 
sioners, and Departments of Public Works, 
forced to do business with it meekly, only to 
hear its dictates and obey. It flows to-day under 
Minetta Street twenty feet below the surface, 
curving toward the Hudson. 

Nearly forty years the imperial activities of 
Minetta have fascinated me. Its bewitching 
story has long threatened to come to the surface 
in print. During the twenty-seven editorial 
years I was crossing from Fourth to Fifth 
Avenue I was often inwardly more aware of its 
silence than of the “thunder of Broadway,” com- 
pared with which no music seemed to Gilder half 
so sweet, not even the streams on his Four- 
Brooks-Farm at Tyringham in the Berkshires. 
Unlike Burns’ “Bonnie Doon,’ Tennyson’s 
“Brook,” and Lanier’s “Song of the Chattahoo- 
chee,’ Minetta is inaudible. It does not belong 
in Mrs. Browning’s “Nooks of English Valleys, 
fed full of noises by invisible streams,” found by 
Aurora Leigh in Shakespeare’s England. It re- 
minds that. fine poet soul Dr. A. J. Lockhart 
(New England’s beloved “Pastor Felix”) of the 
buried brooklet in “Alastor” to which Shelley 
cried, 


MINETTA BROOK 85 


“O Stream 
Whose Source is inaccessibly profound, 
Whither do thy mysterious waters tend ? 
Thou imagest my life.” 


While endless ages roll and countless genera- 
tions pass overhead, none ever overhears 
Minetta’s silent soliloquy. “I curve and flow to 
join the brimming river, for men may come and 
men may go, but I go on forever,” as England’s 
Laureate sang of his “Brook” in 1882. 

During the many years that this overlooked 
streamlet has been flowing through my conscious- 
ness I have watched in vain for any mention of 
it in print. Whitman wrote of Manahatta, “city 
of hurried and sparkling waters,’ and scores 
have written of old New York, but never a word 
about Minetta. Richard Watson Gilder came 
nearest to being the laureate of the city which in 
his day had no finer citizen than he. He put in 
rolling verse the roaring thunders of Broadway, 
akin to the “surge and thunder of the Odyssey.” 
When he lived in Washington Square, right over 
Minetta, he sang, “This is the part of the town 
that I love best;” although in later years he de- 
serted its changing conditions for the alluring 
quiet and refined associations of select and aris- 
tocratic Gramercy Park, for over a century the 
chosen residence of the intellectual elite: Samuel 
Ruggles, founder of that legally reserved Park; 
James Duane, member of the Continental Con- 
gress and Constitutional Convention of 1788, 


86 MY GRAY GULL 


first mayor of New York, appointed by Washing- 
ton first United States district judge of New 
York; James Harper, mayor of New York in 
1844, founder of Harper & Brothers; Peter 
Cooper, founder of Cooper Union; the Rev. 
Francis L. Hawks, first rector of Calvary 
Church; the Rev. H. W. Bellows, first pastor of 
All Souls Unitarian Church; the Rev. A. Cleve- 
land Coxe, rector of Calvary, afterward Bishop 
of Western New York; Samuel J. Tilden, who 
came near being President of the United States; 
Abram 8S. Hewitt, mayor of New York; John 
Bigelow, minister to France; Stanford White, 
architect; Bishop Greer of the Diocese of New 
York; the Rev. H. Y. Satterlee, rector of Calvary, 
later Bishop of Washington, D. C.; Edwin 
Booth, actor; Federal Judge Henry Wade 
Rogers, previously president of Northwestern 
University, dean of the Law Schools of Michigan 
and Yale Universities. The lure of this resort 
of celebrities drew poet and editor Gilder from 
much altered Washington Square to end his 
days in Gramercy Park, a quiet nook just east 
of Fourth Avenue at 20th Street. 

Gilder was chief instigator of the Washington 
Arch where Fifth Avenue starts northward on 
its magnificent way, carving upon it his own 
felicitous inscriptions, but never noticing 
Minetta flowing directly under the pediments 
of his arch. In November, 1924, the city cele- 
brated Fifth Avenue’s first little one hundred 


MINETTA BROOK 87 


years, as a Via Gloriosa, but none celebrated 
Minetta’s million years. That primeval stream 
had been flowing for ages when Peter Minuit 
bought for twenty-four dollars the whole Man- 
hattan Island, where now some Fifth Avenue 
land sells for $3804 a square foot. After all the 
prose has prattled and poetry has rolled its 
rhythms through the centuries this unobtrusive 
potentate still lacks any celebrant; unpardon- 
able lése majesté which gives me one more 
chance to be a laureate for the overlooked. 
Nathan Hale, that intrepid youth who regretted 
he had only one life to give for liberty and hu- 
man rights, shares in a way Minetta’s obscurity. 
Of his unmarked, unrecorded grave one poet 
Sings vaguely as “somewhere beneath the 
thundering city’s pave,’ no one knows where, 
unless Minetta knows the spot and laves it with 
her lips. 

The one most notable event locally linked with 
Minetta was the birth of Theodore Roosevelt in 
1858, close to the source of this subterranean 
stream. Near where this tiny brooklet started 
on its inconspicuous but everlasting career, little 
Teddy climbed out of his cradle and toddled off 
across eventful years to cut a world-momentous 
waterway through the Isthmus of Panama, spht- 
ting the western hemisphere in twain with a ca- 
nal for lack of which the whole world had con- 
sciously suffered during several centuries. Four 
hundred years ago Spain at the height of her 


88 MY GRAY GULL 


power saw the need of an interocean passage 
and considered it, but found difficulties insur- 
mountable. Over seventy years ago what is now 
Colombia signed an agreement with our govern- 
ment preparing the way for the canal. Fifteen 
years later De Lesseps, of Suez Canal fame, am- 
bitious to add to his glory, organized a French 
company which spent three hundred million 
dollars and thousands of lives by disease on the 
Isthmus in eight years and then gave up the tre- 
mendous task. In 1901 Great Britain gave con- 
sent that our government should have full 
sovereignty rights over any isthmian canal that 
might be built. Negotiations with Colombia 
obtained concession of rights for the construc- 
tion. Later Colombia withdrew her agreement. 
Roosevelt, seeing that an urgent, world-need, 
which had been halted for centuries, might be 
held up fifty years more, decided to take the 
Isthmus and go ahead “with the approval of such 
men as John Hay, Taft, and Elihu Root,” to the 
everlasting benefit of the whole isthmian region, 
including Colombia, leaving settlement with that 
country to be made later, as it was. He secured 
from Congress authority to give Colonel Goethals 
a free hand in digging the canal, sending with 
him Colonel Gorgas to fight disease and make the 
isthmus healthful so laborers could live and 
work. Concerning this immortal world-benefit- 
ing act of Roosevelt, one writes a terse and vivid 
verse: 


MINETTA BROOK 89 


“A man went down to Panama 
Where many men had died, 
To slit the sliding mountains 
And admit the eternal tide. 
A man stood up in Panama, 
And the mountains stood aside.” 


In the wide celebration of his sixty-seventh 
birthday one noted poet’s tribute is entitled 
“Sometimes an Eagle Flies Across the Sun.” 

As to the momentousness of Roosevelt’s deed, 
a French writer thinks that in the year 2000 the 
digging of the Panama Canal may stand out as 
the most world-transforming act of the twentieth 
century. “It has upset commercial world-cur- 
rents that were centuries old, and has begun a 
new world-drama. In future ages this will be 
called the century of the Panama Canal and the 
Pacific Ocean. The enormous difficulty of the 
stupendous undertaking impressed Ramsay Mac- 
Donald, British ex-prime minister, when, seek- 
ing in travel recuperation from the wear and tear 
of public office, he went to see the Panama Canal. 
Passing through it he paused at Colon and wrote, 
“The mighty miracle done by the Americans, 
especially at the Atlantic end of the Canal Zone, 
shows how the will and intelligence of man can 
surmount obstacles and subdue Nature whether 
in her most gigantic or most minute terrors.” 

At Panama, if anywhere on earth by human 
will and energy, was a world-changing act. To 
the end of time mankind will see in letters of 


90 MY GRAY GULL 


inextinguishable light above the whole length of 
that earth-cleaving fissure the name of Roosevelt 
as indestructible as the continent it cleft into 
two. That wary Hoosier philosopher, T. R. Mar- 
shall, Woodrow Wilson’s Vice-President, un- 
awed by any man’s alleged greatness, said, “No- 
body yet has ever been big enough to swing the 
stars out of their courses or unbuckle Orion’s 
belt.” But mixing earth’s vastest oceans and 
changing the currents of the commerce of the 
world and the pathways of its fleets was no petty 
provincial performance; nothing less than 
gigantic. 

The feet which first pattered on the pavements 
of New York above Minetta Brook went pioneer- 
ing through jungles of Panama, Africa, South 
America: in the last of which the print of his 
feet on its banks and the keel of his boat on its 
bosom made famous in 1914 the River of Doubt 
on which he and his party were wrecked in the 
Devil’s Rapids (a liability on almost any stream 
of doubt). Doubt, hesitation, indecision, belong 
not in his swift career, instantaneous, down- 
right, outspoken. Brazil consecrates his mem- 
ory and punishes the river which threatened him 
by fixing his name upon it. Henceforth it is 
Rio Roosevelt on official maps. From Minetta 
Brook over to the wilds of South America ran 
the phenomenal life of a dynamic and unforget- 
table American; and now to the _ historian’s 
imagination Roosevelt’s river bends northward 


MINETTA BROOK 91 


across the equator to flow past the grave at 
Oyster Bay: a shrine for pilgrimages like Mount 
Vernon on the Potomac, and Springfield, Illinois. 

His footprints are on all continents, most of 
all on his own. In the Black Hills the faces of 
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt 
look down from a huge, high cliff, carved in 
granite together—the last the only one of the 
four really known to and at home in that wild, 
rocky region. 

Decisive words comporting with dynamic 
deeds are dinted in the record of the Minetta- 
born boy. At twenty-one he said, “I will live 
my life up to the hilt till I am sixty;” and he did 
it, driving the lightning express of his puissant 
career into the home station on January 6, 1919, 
less than three months beyond his announced 
schedule. | 

Advising the boys of the East Side how to play 
the game of life he said in vivid virile football 
lingo, “Don’t flinch, don’t foul, hit the line hard.” 
And his trenchant words abide in bronze on New 
York’s lower East Side. 

When two powerful nations were pressing 
claims on poor Venezuela, and Germany refus- 
ing to join England in submitting claims to arbi- 
tration, was menacing with her war ships the 
little South American State, President Roose- 
velt intervened and said to Doctor Holleben, 
German ambassador at Washington, “Unless we 
have within forty-eight hours Germany’s consent 


92 MY GRAY GULL 


to arbitrate, Admiral Dewey will move his bat- 
tleship fleet from the West Indies to the coast of 
Venezuela.” And the Kaiser consented. When 
Perdicaris, an American citizen, obscure but en- 
titled to protection by his country, was held for 
ransom by Raisuli, a Moroccan bandit, Roose- 
velt flashed his demand to the Sultan of Morocco, 
“Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,’ and the Sul- 
tan got busy, the American was released. Kaiser 
and Sultan came down at Teddy’s call. In 1905 
a little New Hampshire seaport became famous 
in world-history when the Peace of Portsmouth 
was signed on American soil by two fighting na- 
tions, ending the Russo-Japanese war on Septem- 
ber 6; a consummation largely influenced by 
weighty persuasions of the tactful President of 
the United States. A perpetual belligerent for 
the right, he carried in consequence an assassin’s 
bullet in his body. When he was shot in Mil- 
waukee he called to those who seized the would- 
be murderer, “Don’t hurt him, bring him to me.” 
When veterans of the Spanish War, nearly thirty 
years after, placed in Seaside Park, Coney 
_Island, a tablet in honor of Comrade Theodore 
Roosevelt, author of the phrase “truculent 
righteousness,” they inscribed upon the tablet 
a sentence from his writings, “Aggressive 
fighting for the right is the noblest sport the 
world affords.” Henry M. Stanley’s words about 
Glave, the young African explorer, apply to 
Roosevelt. “He relished a task in proportion to 


MINETTA BROOK 93 


its hardness and welcomed danger with a fierce 
joy.” 

Few of nature’s witcheries match the mystic 
charm of brooks. The liquid notes of the wood- 
thrush or Shelley’s skylark at heaven’s gate 
make no more perfect music than a mountain 
rill at Buck Hill in the Poconos, singing across 
the road under my feet and down the mossy 
slope through dense woods to the steep foamy 
plunge beyond like the Staubach at Lauter- 
brunnen. <A certain bishop of an arduous Area, 
would like to have when retired from active ser- 
vice, a mountain brook in his backyard, with the 
Marine Band playing perfect music in his front- 
yard. Literature, like life, bubbles and babbles 
with brooks, and poets are obsessed: Milton’s 
brooks in Vallombrosa o’erarched by Etrurian 
shades, strewn thick with autumn leaves: Dan- 
te’s little brooks from the green hills of the 
Casentino going down into the Aruo, singing 
in the guilty Brescian coiner’s memory far down 
in hell: Burns’ “Bonnie Doon,” whose banks 
and braes are dear as Highland Mary: Tenny- 
son’s immortal verses: Lanier’s “Song of the 
Chattahoochee.” To hearing ears, bright spark- 
ling streams, like starry spheres, are “forever 
singing as they shine.” Even a hidden brook 
may cast a spell and lasso the imagination as 
Minetta, lacking any other laureate, has mine 
for nearly half my lifetime. 

Nearing the end of earthly life, I hear again 


94 MY GRAY GULL 


Minetta’s silent laughter, the hidden Minnehaha 
of Manhattan’s rocky isle, innocent denizen of 
the underworld, older than the oldest aborigines ; 
and I also hear in Palestine one other sub- 
terranean stream which flows through memory. 
Wordsworth wrote of “subterranean music like 
the noise of bagpipes in distant highland hills.” 
No music witches me as do the bagpipes, except 
the dear voice of my intoxicating Scotchman, 
Charles Macaulay Stuart. 

Once fifty years ago I had the felicity of sleep- 
ing directly over a babbling brook hidden under- 
ground. It wasa Holy Land night ina tent ona 
grassy plateau just above Solomon’s Pools on 
the road from Jerusalem to Hebron. Five men 
listened with an ecstasy of awe to its liquid 
laughter along its rocky channel, gurgling un- 
derneath us down from springs higher up, on 
its way to the Pools just below. To the man 
on the cot next to Harry W. Warren’s it recalled 
the “pleasant noise the sails made on till noon,” 
in the ears of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: “A 
noise as of a hidden brook in the leafy month 
of June, which to the sleeping woods all night 
singeth a quiet tune.” 

To Henry Warren it suggested the solemn 
voice of Conscience at the bottom of the soul in 
the dark night watches. The memory of this 
was revived by Riley’s verses on “Conscience,” 
in which a boy lying awake all alone in the dark, 
hectored by his conscience in the middle of the 


MINETTA BROOK 95 


night, asks his merciless tormentor, “Where do 
you stay day-times?” An exemplary wife and 
mother in Philadelphia, troubled with insomnia, 
said to her minister, ‘““SSometimes when I le 
awake hour after hour I seem to myself the 
meanest woman in the world.” But her family 
and friends knew it was her nerves that did that, 
and her exacting ideals, not her conscience. 
Russell Lowell’s fine aphorism about conscience 
seems not irrelevant here: “Conscience is the 
good taste of the soul, as good taste is the con- 
science of the mind.” | 

Minetta Brook and the underground stream 
above Solomon’s Pools, and the voice of con- 
science in the depths of the soul—they all have 
somewhat to say or suggest. “He that hath 
ears to hear let him hear.” Bishop Quayle, for 
one, had ears to hear inarticulate voices in deep 
depths or on far heights. The microphone over- 
hearing the conversation of insects was “not in 
it’ with him. The radio in the Steinmetz 
Laboratory at Schenectady hearing the roaring 
of iron atoms as they are attacked by the magnet 
“had nothing on him” or on us. “With Harth 
and Sky” he heard loud reverberations of si- 
lence; heard what the angels say gossiping up 
and down the Milky Way; walked past the win- 
dows of the Pleiades when lights were lit and 
curtains up, and knew the family secrets of the 
Seven Stars. The radio was nothing new to 
him; for fifty years, like countless millions in 


96 MY GRAY GULL 


all ages, he was listening in on Heaven, till on 
March 9, 1925, he went up the shining way to 
a “house not made with hands.” Before his 


/ ascension he said he wanted to live next door 


to me up Yonder. My heart links that message 
with the one sent me from his death-bed by my 
college-friend, that Christian gentleman par ex- 
cellence, George Slocum Bennett, of Wilkes- 
Barre; “Give him my love. Tell him I’ll meet 
him on the other side.’ He’ll keep his tryst 
wi me, at what hour I dinna ken. And 
“through the ages all along” Minetta Brook will 
still flow from Roosevelt’s birthplace “to join 
the brimming river” in the greatest of earth’s 
cities. 


Vv 
THE WATERMARK IN HUMAN NATURE 


THE oldest Scripture is written legibly in the 
created universe, wherein is a revelation of in- 
finite power, wisdom, and beneficence. In Alfred 
Noyes’ words, “There is a scribble of God’s 
finger in the sky.” The universe and its revela- 
tion are older than the Bible, older than man. 

The clearest, fullest, all-revealing, all-suffic- 
ing Scripture is written in the Bible, chiefly in 
the New Testament by its revelation of God in 
Christ—his personality, his life, his teaching, 
his atoning death and glorious resurrection. 

But the closest, deepest, most intimate and 
most inescapable Scripture is written not in 
stars and seas and rocks nor on tables of 
stone nor in the Holy Book, but on the tablets 
of the human heart and conscience; more in- 
escapable than the revelations of universe, or 
Bible; closer to us “than breathing, and nearer 
than hands and feet.” The physical universe is 
external to man and the revelation of God therein 
can be ignored; the Bible also is external and 
can be put upon the shelf; but a man cannot 
put away his own inner nature nor tear out in- 
stincts and convictions which are woven into 
the very tissues of his moral being. 

97 


98 MY GRAY GULL 


The watermark in human nature seems an 
apt descriptive name for that inwritten Scrip- 
ture. The watermark in writing paper is some- 
thing worked into the very tissues of the paper. 
It is part of the plan and make of the paper, not 
stamped on externally after the paper was fin- 
ished, like a notary public’s certificate and seal 
on a legal document, but put into the paper when 
the paper was made by whoever made the paper. 
Usually it is the name of the maker. A 
peculiarity of the watermark is that it is in- 
visible if the paper lies flat, but becomes visible 
when the paper is lifted and held against the 
light. 

The bottom fact for man, the fact which is the 
very corner stone of all religion, is not an in- 
spired Book, but his own moral and spiritual 
nature. Except by exercising the faculties of 
his own spiritual nature man has no capacity 
for receiving a revelation from any source, nor 
any power of judging whether a book is or is 
not divine. And it is upon the verdict of those 
faculties that the Old and New Testaments 
chiefly depend for acceptance as divine and au- 
thoritative. It was that verdict that settled 
the faith of the poet Whittier, who in late years 
wrote to a friend: “Really, the convincing 
reason why we receive the Bible as the Word of 
God is because it accords with our highest in- 
tuitions. We find the law and the prophets in 
our own souls. Our hearts burn within us as 


THE WATERMARK 99 


we walk with Jesus through the New Testament.” 
Those farsighted intuitions, deep and high, are 
God’s tuitions. To another friend Whittier 
wrote: ‘The inner revelation written by the 
spirit of the living God is the stronghold of 
Christianity against the critical and agnostic 
spirit of our age. No revelation of science, no de- 
structive biblical criticism can shake the faith 
of those who listen for the voice of God in their 
own souls.”” In accord with Whittier’s reasoned 
conviction, based on the Scripture written on 
the heart and conscience, is Russell Lowell’s 
faith in what he called the Rock of Ages. That 
he regarded those intuitions as fundamental and 
decisive was indicated in a letter to a friend by 
a remark directed at those who make protoplasm 
an atheistic fetish: “Such a mush seems to me a 
poor substitute for the Rock of Ages—by which 
I mean a certain set of deep central instincts 
which mankind have found solid under their 
feet in all weathers’—instincts which lie deeper 
than natural science can fathom with its ex- 
planations and speculations, or even imagine 
intelligently. 

As to the contents of this inner Scripture, a 
brief analysis and orderly enumeration may give 
greater definiteness to faith and greater depth to 
conviction and may kindle into intensity our 
Christian enthusiasm. Holding human nature 
up against the light we see watermarked in its 
tissues certain words corresponding to realities 


100 MY GRAY GULL 


and indicative of innate convictions concerning 
spiritual things. 

I. TrurH. Truth is the opposite of false- 
hood or error. It is idea, conception, statement 
corresponding with the facts in the case. Every 
sound mind believes in the reality of truth, and 
recognizes its superiority to error, its claim on 
human credence and acceptance, its sure guid- 
ance to safety and well-being. Moreover, the 
human mind, instinctively assuming that truth 
is within its reach and that man is equipped 
with faculties able to discover and apprehend 
truth, seeks truth as hungrily as it seeks food, 
and forever persists in the pursuit of truth from 
generation to generation, however unsuccessful 
the search. It is impossible to make a sane man 
believe that there is no such thing as truth—or 
that truth and error are the same thing, or that 
they are of equal merit or worth, or that it 
makes no difference which of them we choose 
and follow and propagate. When an Indian 
Squaw, being sworn in court, was asked if she 
understood the nature of the oath she had taken, 
she said it was a strong promise to tell the 
truth. Requested to define the difference be- 
tween the truth and a lie, she said: ‘The 
truth is the truth and a le is a lie: They are 
different, and you can’t make them alike.” Even 
a squaw knows that. Finally, man instinctively 
expects with undying optimism the ultimate 
triumph of truth and the banishing of error. 


THE WATERMARK 101 


II. Ricutr. Right as a reality is written on 
the tablets of the heart, watermarked in the 
tissues of man’s nature. Right is agreement 
with the will of God, conformity with the 
supreme moral standard. Whether it is right 
because God wills it, or whether God wills it 
because it is right is a metaphysical question of 
small practical importance, though we incline 
to think the authoritative standard is lodged in 
the divine nature, in the bosom of God. Man 
instinctively knows that right and wrong are 
opposites, and that all sanctity, dignity, au- 
thority, and claim are with the right, none 
whatever with the wrong. Impossible to per- 
Suade any normal person that there is no differ- 
ence between them, or that the difference is un- 
important. It is the supreme difference, and 
cleaves the universe in twain. And man’s own 
nature tells him he ought to “abhor that which 
is evil and cleave to that which is good.” 

However men’s ideas may differ as to what is 
right and what wrong in any given case, no nor- 
mally constituted human being can question the 
reality of right. When young Horace Bushnell 
paced his room in Yale College, overwhelmed 
by doubt and darkness, he said to himself, ‘Is 
there, then, nothing that I firmly believe?” And 
his mind answered, “Yes, there is this one: I 
have never doubted the distinction between right 
and wrong. I cannot doubt the reality of right.” 
And when a man recognizes and admits the 


102 MY GRAY GULL 


reality of right he faces the necessity of believ- 
ing, and is mightily helped to believe, a great 
deal more. 

As Froude, the historian, said in his greatest 
lecture: ‘The moral law is written on the tab- 
lets of Eternity. The universe is so made that 
truth and justice alone can endure. Injustice 
and falsehood may be long-lived but doomsday 
comes to them at last, often in terrible way.” 


“God’s will fulfilled shall be, 
For in daylight or in dark 

His thunderbolt hath eyes to see 
Its way home to the mark.” 


The same moral law which the student of 
history sees operating in events and in human 
experience, the student of anthropology finds 
written on the tablets of the human heart as on 
the tablets of Eternity. The organ faculty by 
which man discerns right from wrong we call 
conscience — con-scio — knowledge with — with 
God, knowing as God knows the difference be- 
tween right and wrong. As Browning puts it, 


“The truth in God’s breast 
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed.” 


Of conscience there is no better brief and simple 
description than to say it is the voice inside a 
man which says “I ought” or “I ought not.” Of 
this holy voice Bishop Butler says in one of his 
“Sermons on Human Nature,” “Had it strength 
as it has right, had it power as it has manifest 


THE WATERMARK 103 


authority, it would absolutely govern the world.” 
It is the voice of duty. 
“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So like is God to man, 


When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ 
The youth replies, ‘I can.’” 


And when he says, “I will,” his soul is saved. 

By following Nietzsche beyond Good and Evil, 
a@ man or a nation comes to the place where 
Might makes right, and that is hell, the abode 
of the damned. Twenty centuries after Christ 
a nation or government by disregarding the 
majesty and authority of Right and acting upon 
the diabolical doctrine that might makes right 
has made “kultur” and barbarism synonymous. 
The task before civilized nations to-day is to en- 
force upon all governments the law of righteous- 
ness written in the conscience of every sane and 
undebauched moral being. 

III. Gop. In the sixteenth century Calvin 
emphasized the evidential force of what he 
called the sensus divinitatis in ipsis medullis 
et visceribus hominis infivus—the sense of God 
infixed in the very brain and viscera of man. 
And long before the third century, Tertullian, 
famous for his defense of the Christian com- 
munity against its vilifiers, a defense which 
pictured the innocence, brotherliness, and phil- 
anthropy of the Christians, their simplicity, 
frugality, and prayerfulness, in the days when 


104 MY GRAY GULL 


all that Rome could hear from the catacombs 
where the Christians hid from persecutions was 
the murmur of prayer, the hymns of the martyrs 
and the songs of praise to Christ—Tertullian in 
those early days pointed out to the Romans that 
the universal sense of God and craving for God 
was a proof of his existence, and set forth “the 
natural Christianity of the soul” by showing 
that the truths of the gospel find an echo in the 
convictions and needs of the human heart. 

IV. Gop—TuHeE Creator. Practically all 
men, the untutored and the learned alike, be- 
lieve in a Creator. The North American Indian, 
whose favorite name for the Supreme Being is 
a word which literally signifies the “Power that 
makes,” and Herbert Spencer using the lingo of 
science: “Amid all the mysteries by which we are 
surrounded, nothing is more certain than that 
we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and 
Eternal Energy from which all things proceed,” 
savage and sage are agreed. Napoleon on the 
Ship’s deck, waving his hand toward the glitter- 
ing night sky and saying, “Gentlemen, who made 
all that?” spoke the universal human mind. 
Speaking of Napoleon we recall Count Tolstoy’s 
story in his powerful book, War and Peace, of 
Prince Andre Bolonsky lying wounded on the 
battlefield. Bolonsky, recovering consciousness, 
opened his eyes, hoping to see how the artillery 
struggle with the enemy ended and anxious to 
know whether or not the red-headed artillerist 


THE WATERMARK 105 


was killed, and the cannon saved or captured. 
But lying on his back, he could see nothing but 
the lofty immeasurable sky. “How still, calm, 
and solemn. How entirely different from when 
I was running,” said Prince Andre to himself. 
“It was not so when we were all running and 
shouting and fighting. How is it that I never 
before saw this lofty sky, and how glad I am 
that I have learned to know it at last! Yes, all 
is empty, all is deception except those infinite 
heavens. Nothing, nothing at all beside: And 
silence and peace. Thank God: they are full 
ni 

Then the Emperor Napoleon, the idol of the 
young Russian prince’s worship, passes with 
his staff. 

“Voila une belle mort,” said Napoleon, gazing 
at Bolonsky. Prince Andre realized that this 
was said to him, and that it was spoken by 
Napoleon. But he heard these words as if they 
had been the buzzing of a fly. He knew that 
this was Napoleon, his hero; but at that moment 
Napoleon seemed to him small and insignifi- 
cant in comparison with that lofty heaven 
with the clouds flying over it. It was a matter 
of utter indifference to him who stood looking 
down upon him, or what was said about him at 
that moment: Nothing earthly mattered any 
more. The prince had never really noticed the 
infinite heavens nor said, “Thank God,” until he 
lay bleeding to death on the battlefield, Man’s 


—-:106 MY GRAY GULL 


reason responds to the silent argument of the 
starry sky. The formulated argument from de- 
sign is as old as Xenophon’s “Memorabilia.” 
Paley and the authors of the Bridgewater Trea- 
tises gave the argument its fullest development. 
Kyven to such a man as Voltaire that argument 
furnished. convincing proof of the existence of 
God. To the logical mind of John Stuart Mill the 
manifest presence of intelligence and design in 
nature was the most unquestionable of all these 
evidences, amounting to absolute demonstration. 

For over two generations past some have 
imagined that the certainty of a Creator was 
blurred by some discoveries in natural science; 
that the force of the argument from design had 
been weakened; and thus the flimsy faith of 
some was shaken. We have passed through a 
period of hasty, shallow, and nearsighted think- 
ing. We have emerged into the open. The panic 
proved to be but temporary. To-day the man 
of science who does not know that even in scien- 
tific circles the overpushed pendulum has swung 
back again to the argument from design as proof 
of an infinite creative Intelligence is belated and 
uninformed as to what has gone on in the in- 
tellectual world. Once more the logical proof 
of God as Creator has its unclouded place in the 
sun, Just as the innate belief in the power that 
makes it lodged firmly in the common sense of 
mankind and graven deep into the tablets of the 
human heart. If the Son of man should come 


THE WATERMARK 107 


now, he would find on the earth more faith in a 
divine Creator, a Power that makes, an infinite 
and eternal personal Energy from whom all 
things proceed, than was here thirty or forty 
years ago, or ever before since the morning stars 
first sang together and the sons of God shouted 
for joy their homage to the Creator. Darwin’s 
theory of the origin of species lacks confirma- 
tion. 

That a regulating law of development is seen 
in natural history controlling the order of pro- 
gress no intelligent person will deny. God is a 
God of order and not of confusion. But the 
Darwinian theory of natural selection as a valid 
and adequate account of the universe is un- 
proved by facts. There is no instance of varia- 
tion by natural selection. The Darwinian school 
reasoned that it is no longer necessary to infer 
the presence of design in this universe “now 
that the law of natural selection has been dis- 
covered.” Darwin’s discovery, shared by Wal- 
lace, was supposed by many unscientific persons 
to have dispensed with a Creator. The funeral 
of God was announced. But after the Darwin- 
ian theory had been long and_ searchingly 
scrutinized, pondered, and tested, Lord Kelvin, 
a scientist of highest rank, summed up his 
judgment in these words: “The argument of de- 
sign has been too much lost sight of in zoological 
speculations. Overpowering proofs of intelli- 
gent and benevolent design lie all around us, 


108 MY GRAY GULL 


and come back upon us with irresistible force, 
showing us the influence of a Free Will working 
through nature, and teaching us that all living 
things depend on one ever living Creator and 
Ruler.” : 

Lord Salisbury, one of England’s greatest 
minds, in an address delivered by him as presi- 
dent of the British Association of Science in the 
' Sheldonian Theater at Oxford, controverted and 
dismissed Darwin’s theory of the origin of 
Species, criticizing in particular Professor Weis- 
mann for demanding acceptance for a mere 
theory the truth of which Weismann admitted 
he could not demonstrate, and for a hypo- 
thetical process the operation of which he con- 
fessed he could not even imagine. Lord Salis- 
bury pointed out that no instance of variation 
by natural selection had been proved. But varia- 
tion of species by external superintending pur- 
pose directing the action of natural forces is one 
of the most familiar facts of our modern world. 
(For some of these facts inquire of Luther 
Burbank, whose superintending intelligence 
makes a business of producing variations of 
Species.) Science cannot silence Browning in 
“Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau” : 

“This is the glory—that in all 

I recognized a mind, 

Not mine, but like mine, 

Making all things for me, and me for Him.” 


Darwin did not render absurd the rapturous 


THE WATERMARK 109 


words of Kepler, discovering the laws by which 
the planets move, recognizing a Mind like his 
own at work in the universe, and exclaiming 
with a sense of kinship and intercourse with the 
Infinite Intelligence, “O God, I think thy 
thoughts after thee.” 

V. Gop.—A Morat Governor. This, too, is 
among man’s natural and instinctive convictions, 
written within, also forever corroborated and 
taught in that school of Law which we call Life. 
The human being very early becomes a student 
of law, with experience as his teacher. Begin- 
ning probably with the law of gravitation, he 
encounters the laws one by one and learns what 
they require of him. The child failing through 
ignorance to regard the law of gravitation, falls 
and is bruised; gets his first lesson in law. The 
System of Things uses the earth as a big 
hammer to drive the lesson in with painful em- 
phasis. The child puts down in his notebook 
that day, “Law No. 1.” From that he goes on 
discovering laws, finds that he and the whole 
universe are under law—laws physical, mental, 
moral, spiritual. He observes that the System 
of Things smiles on the lawkeeper and rewards 
him, frowns on the lawbreaker and penalizes 
him. The system of pt says, “It shall be 
well with the righteous.” 

This is a governed universe, a cosmos, not a 
chaos. Law implies a Lawgiver, a government 
means a Governor. Belief in a Moral Governor 


110 MY GRAY GULL 


is natural and almost inevitable to normal hu- 
man nature. Men announce their discovery and 
phrase their common conviction, each in his own 
vernacular. <A sea captain, ashore for a few 
hours, went into.a prayer meeting and stood up 
to bear his testimony: “My friends, I have sailed 
many seas, landed in many ports, heard many 
languages, seen many people in many lands. I 
have observed that this world seems to be so made 
that wherever a man is he can afford to do just 
about right, and he can’t afford to do otherwise.” 
So testifies the plain sailor man, coming from 
his ship at anchor in the harbor, and standing 
up to speak in church. To like effect, if not in 
like manner, Matthew Arnold, speaking from 
his pinnacle on the highest plateau of intellec- 
tual culture, using the vocabulary of his 
critical class, voices the same conviction with 
equal certitude, when he bows reverently before 
the “Power (not ourselves) that makes for 
righteousness.” 

This conviction concerning moral government 
and a Moral Governor, which is confirmed by 
common experience and by the loftiest and pro- 
foundest thinking, is among our intuitive beliefs, 
written in us by the spirit of the living God that 
made us. 

VI. Free Acency. Moral freedom, power of 
choice, ability to choose either the right or the 
wrong is elementary in consciousness. When a 
fatalistic theology, now silent, told us that our 


THE WATERMARK gma 


fate is foreordained by eternal decrees; or 
Spinoza told us that our free will is an illusion, 
or a metaphysical fatalism tells us we are neces- 
sarily controlled by the strongest motive, so that 
our choice and action are determined by the 
Power which selects and presents the motive, or 
materialistic scientists tells us that we are au- 
tomata, mere machines operated by vital 
forces: we pay no more attention to them than 
was paid to the old sophists when they proved 
the impossibility of motion by saying, “A body 
cannot move where it is nor where it is not.” 
Men kept on moving about as usual, simply got 
up and went, in the most unsophisticated man- 
ner, not being metaphysical enough to know how 
impossible it was for them to do so. The denials 
of free agency make no more impression than 
did Bishop Berkeley’s denial of the existence of 
matter, to which Byron replied, ““When Berkeley 
says there is no matter, it is no matter what 
Berkeley says;’ no more impression than was 
made on the Board of Education in Burlington, 
Iowa, by Mother Eddy’s non-Christian non- 
Scientists requesting that their children be ex- 
cused from studying physiology because they 
did not want their children to believe that such 
things as stomach, liver, lungs, and other physi- 
cal organs have any real existence. Although 
Huxley’s general teaching favored the idea that 
we are machines worked by vital forces, yet he 
says, inconsistently, “Our volition counts for 


112 MY GRAY GULL 


something in conditioning the course of events.” 
Something in his own complex nature made that 
sure- 

The only answer we take the trouble to make 
to the deniers, is. the curt and impatient reply 
of rough Sam Johnson when he broke away from 
a pertinacious disputant, saying, “I know I’m 
free, and that’s the end of it.” 

Man’s free agency and power of choice are 
matters of consciousness written deep in his 
inmost conviction, a part of the Holy Scripture 
watermarked in his very nature. 

VII. AccounTaBILity. This is the inevitable 
corollary and consequence of freedom. However 
the speculative question may be subtly argued 
about, man’s accountability is everywhere as- 
sumed as a fundamental certainty. Human 
society treats the individual as responsible for 
his doings, and calls him to account. Every 
man, whatever his attitude toward himself, 
holds his neighbors responsible for their be- 
havior toward him. The transgressor is prone 
to put in the plea of nonresponsibility. In the 
New York city Tombs there was a prisoner who 
wrote poems for the newspapers, one of which 
was a plea for leniency on the ground that he 
had been overcome by too-strong temptation, 
that he was not bad but only weak; and he spoke 
of himself pathetically as “a waif of life in the 
current strong.” But I noticed that no attention 
was paid to his plea by the court which tried 


THE WATERMARK 1138 


him. When his case came up he got the full 
penalty of the law he had broken. Every court 
on earth or in heaven proceeds and must pro- 
ceed on the certainty that the individual is re- 
sponsible. Gradually it is explained to the in- 
dividual by the System of Things, by the sky 
and the earth and the men around him, that he 
is held accountable for his words and actions. 
Omar Khayyém probably knew in his inmost 
soul that he was guilty ofa futile attempt at 
evasion when he argued with the Supreme 
Power which held him responsible, “True, I am 
a sinner; but consider in what a tangled world 
you placed me, with what strong passions and 
what a feeble will.” 

Far deeper, and more convincing still, man’s 
own nature*holds him responsible. There is an 
Authority within which summons him to the 
bar and pronounces judgment. “Every man 
bears about a silent court of justice in his breast, 
himself the judge and jury, and himself the 
prisoner at the bar.” 

Physical science teaches that the universe 
makes and preserves as in a book a literal record 
of every word and act. A Day of Judgment 
when the books shall be opened is scientifically 
among the most reasonable of human expecta- 
tions, and the transgressor’s “fearful looking for 
the judgment to come” is warranted by the 
habitual attitude and aspect of the System of 
Things toward the violater of law. 


114 MY GRAY GULL 


VIII. Sin. Sin is moral misbehavior, moral 
failure. The figurative words used to signify 
sins are suggestive. Among the punctilious 
Chinese, the most minutely ceremonious people 
in the world, the word which comes nearest to 
expressing our idea of sin is one the root meaning 
of which is, a breach of etiquette—in the minds 
of the rigidly punctilious an inexcusable offense. 

The figurative word of the New Testament 
for sin means literally missing the mark. “I 
have sinned: I have missed the mark.” One of 
the New Year’s emblems which Japanese friends 
send to each other pictures a target with an 
arrow sticking in the bull’s eye, meaning, “May 
you hit the mark.” Here is the idea of a mark 
to be aimed at, a definite standard to be rec- 
ognized and complied with. Men know they 
have failed to reach their own ideal, much more 
the divine standard of right behavior. They have 
missed the mark at which the soul and life 
should aim. Nay, worse: they have often utterly 
ignored the mark, not even caring to hit it. Even 
the best of them know they have fallen short, 
and the better they are the more painfully con- 
scious are they of their shortcomings and 
failures. 

Sin as a fact is watermarked in the central 
consciousness of mankind. The hearts of men 
are troubled by a sense of guilt. Even through 
the rudest worship of savage peoples the peni- 
tential note strikes in. Even in forests and 


THE WATERMARK 115 


jungles there are altars raised for the offering 
of propitiatory sacrifices to placate offended 
deity and avert divine wrath. Self-inflicted 
penances are practised even among untutored 
tribes. Such things are proofs of conscious sin 
and guilt in the natural man. 

The distinctness and intensity of this natural 
sense of sin vary in different individuals and at 
different stages of spiritual progress. Keukichy 
Kataoka, an eminent Japanese statesman, be- 
came a Christian by degrees, and described the 
stages of his progress. He came first to a belief 
in God as a heavenly Father who cares for his 
children and hears and answers their prayers. 
The sense of sin, at least any deep sense of it, 
and the belief of the divinity of Christ, were 
slow in coming. And these two came close to- 
gether. He could scarcely tell which came first. 
The most significant fact is that as his sense of 
demerit, shortcoming, sin deepened he felt his 
need of divine help through an atoning Saviour, 
and soon he could look up humbly to the Re- 
deemer and say with Thomas, “My Lord and my 
God.” Then he publicly made confession of sin 
and openly declared himself a Christian. In- 
complete religions, like Parseeism, say: “Yes, 
man is a sinner in word and deed and thought. 
The only way to atone is by better behavior.” 
Without the Christian gospel no other atonement 
is known. This is one defect of non-Christian 
religions. 


116 MY GRAY GULL 


Sin, guilt, penalty—these are written connect- 
edly in the convictions and apprehensions of 
man’s inmost soul; and the tragedy of them is 
the theme of some of the mightiest literature. 

Truly it is said that “Dante’s conception of 
the ‘Inferno’ was wrought out of his life, with 
labor, with agonies, with blood and tears. It 
was conceived in a passion of love and regret, 
matured through years of struggle and sorrow. 
That world of torment which he pictured—he 
knew it, for he had lived it. He had tasted the 
bitterness of banishment, destitute, exiled, and 
hated. He had learned that the soul has no hope 
and no stay save in the Eternal. Thus he came 
through suffering and torment to an _ over- 
powering conviction of the reality of the Unseen. 
In a sense he took upon himself the sins of the 
world, and felt that the cause of the world’s woe 
is wickedness and that its all-inclusive misery 
is its want of the knowledge and love of God, 
the Saviour.” 

Herbert Spencer is quoted as saying, “Every 
man with a sensitive conscience knows what it 
is to be in hell, and has stayed there long enough 
to know what eternal punishment means.” Sam 
Jones, reformed from a life of dissipation and 
vice into a powerful evangelist, when asked if 
he believed there is a hell, answered, feelingly 
and conclusively, “I’ve been there.” 

Seneca, the ancient Roman moralist, said, 
“The whole human race needs forgiveness.” 


THE WATERMARK 117 


And now for the first, in our present study, 
we have come in sight of Calvary. The con- 
sciousness of sin and the conscious need of for- 
giveness make Christianity credible. That deep 
want is a socket into which the cross fits exactly. 
The crucifixion took place on the summit of 
man’s highest heavenward aspiration. 

We have enumerated some of the convictions 
watermarked in man’s nature, innate and in- 
tuitive, not injected and not originated nor in- 
troduced by education or invention. 

One more great word is watermarked within, 
visible when the light shines through. 

IX. ImmMorTauiry. Dr. R. Martin Pope says: 
“Our acceptance of immortality on the Christian 
basis depends entirely on the kind of impression 
which the transcendent personality and life of 
Jesus convey to our spirit.” 

That is true, but the belief in life beyond the 
grave is not exclusively Christian; it was in the 
world before Jesus came. Although ‘brought 
fully to light only by him, it was ever an innate 
premonition, part of the watermark in aborig- 
inal human nature, before there were philos- 
ophers to argue it or prophets to announce it. 
Seers and sages even before Christ taught it: 
Aristotle — “Whatsoever that be within us 
that talks, thinks, desires, animates, is some- 
thing celestial, divine, and consequently im- 
perishable; Socrates, when the cup of poison 
was bringing death to his lips—“You may bury 


118 MY GRAY GULL 


me if you can catch me. That which you bury 
will not be Socrates. I am certain that there 
is something hereafter, and something better for 
the good than for the bad.” 

But the basis of man’s belief in a. future life 
is broader and deeper than the reasoning of 
scholars and sages, as well as antecedent to the 
New Testament. The primitive races showed 
Signs of presentiments and apprehensions like 
those which Aristotle and Socrates entertained. 
The wild untaught red Indian found on this 
continent by our forefathers in the beginning did 
not imagine this life to be all, but believed that, 
beyond the golden gates of the west and the 
red splendor of sunsets, there were happy hunt- 
ing grounds for the good Indian. 

In all ages there has been in a man the 
apprehension of a spirit-world unperceived by 
bodily senses, surrounding or pervading the 
physical world; and also the expectation of con- 
tinued spiritual existence beyond this present 
life on earth. A sense of something in him that 
was not born to die is liable to stir in every man, 
whether savage or civilized. In quaint Henry 
Vaughan’s words, at times “we feel through all 
our fleshly dress bright shoots of everlasting- 
ness.” This expectation is as necessary to any 
worthy life for man as it is inherent in his con- 
stitution. If the wages of virtue were dust, man 
‘would not have the heart to endure for the fate 
of the worm and the fly. The general law and 


THE WATERMARK 119 


custom of God’s universe seems to be, that what 
is necessary is provided. And so this needed 
preintimation of future existence is inwrought 
in the tissues of the soul, part of the watermark 
in human nature, in order that there may be 
in man adequate reason, motive, and aspiration 
for worthy, courageous, and noble thinking and 
living. 

We have now enumerated the items in the con- 
tents of the Holy Scripture, written not with 
ink, but by the spirit of the living God; not on 
tables of stone, but on the tablets of the heart. 
And these items: Truth; Right; God a Creator 
and a Moral Governor; Free Agency; Moral 
Accountability; Sin and Guilt; Atonement; Re- 
pentance, Forgiveness, Salvation; Immortality 
—these make up the bulk and substance of re- 
ligion; there is full warrant for speaking of the 
“substance of religion,” for these very intuitions, 
lying like shadows in the depths of the soul, or 
like gleams of light across the mind, are evidence 
that religion is substantial. Only substance 
could cast such shadows, only a real source of 
radiance diffuse such light. 

In his Foundations of Belief A. J. Balfour 
speaks of “beliefs which everybody holds,” and 
says that investigations into the ultimate 
grounds of belief had better begin with those 
practically universal beliefs. Borden P. Bowne 
spoke of “beliefs which we hold, not because we 
have proved them, but which we sometimes try 


120 MY GRAY GULL 


to prove because we hold them”; he might have 
said just as truly, “they hold us.” They are the 
response of the soul to what we have seen to be 
watermarked in the human constitution. 

At this point the moral integrity of the Maker 
is involved. If these inwrought convictions do 
not point to realities, then the Creator who made 
man thus has practiced deception on us. This 
is not only morally impossible but scientifically 
absurd, for John Tyndall, an honest man of 
science, said: “Even from a purely scientific 
standpoint we discover a Veracity at the Heart 
of Things.” Science finds everywhere in the 
universe an honest God, not made by man 
but maker and lover of honest men—not of 
ribald scoffers, earning a living by vilifying 
Christianity and defending vile literature 
venders. 

Science reports that it finds no instance of any 
creature cursed by the Creator with an instinc- 
tive craving, a constitutional need or capacity, 
for the satisfaction of which there is in that 
creature's environment no supply, nothing 
corresponding to the innate desire. Science 
finds that cravings and expectations congenitally 
implanted in even the humblest creatures appear 
to be guaranteed by the System of Things, like 
notes indorsed by the Bank of the Universe. 

Because it is not credible that the Veracity 
at the Heart. of Things, who has never been 
caught deceiving even a worm or a black beetle, 


THE WATERMARK 121 


has lied to his noblest creature, therefore it is 
scientifically certain that man’s innate moral 
convictions correspond to realities, that Re- 
ligion’s world is actual, factual, and that the 
Holy Scripture within us is authentically in the 
handwriting of Him who cannot lie. 

Religion is real. 


VI 
A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 


No profession has men of more self-sacrificing 
Spirit than the medical, real angels of mercy. 
Yet we have known some famous physicians, one 
of whom, at least, while brilliant in the technique 
of his profession and showy in displaying his 
knowledge, lacked so much the saving grace of 
common sense and was so destitute of practical 
wisdom that more than one of his patients said, 
“The man is a fool.” Yet a physician has a good 
chance to be, and ought to be, one of the wisest 
and most sensible of men. The directness and 
immediacy of his contact with sheer, undis- 
guised, natural human nature is calculated to 
give him correct and singular knowledge of the 
human elements. In the conversation and writ- 
ings of a gifted, thoroughly trained, honest, and 
experienced physician, we might reasonably ex- 
pect to find a penetrating insight, a cool judg- 
ment, an unperturbed confidence, a patient 
considerateness, a gentle but unhesitating can- 
dor, a shrewd incisiveness of comment, and 
withal a kindly humor which together would 
make his words sagacious, pointed, and reason- 
able. All this and something more we find in 
Dr. Stephen Paget, who has a brainy style of his 

122 


A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 1238 


own, samples of which we may lawfully glean. 
To this sensitive, observant, and thoughtful 
physician the world is as full of wonder as any 
region in which Lewis Carroll’s Alice found her- 
self. Quoting Aristotle’s saying that wisdom 
begins in wonder, he says: “The only way 
toward wisdom is that which begins at the gate 
of Surprise and goes along the dim groves of 
Bewilderment.” Then he has this ‘about what 
the Fool says in his heart: “The fool is he who 
takes for his motto Nil Admirari. He does not 
wonder at anything. He chose this motto, 
suggested by the devil, because he says in his 
heart that there is no God, nothing to wonder 
at. He is not surprised, not he, at nature. He 
sees what is in his line of sight, and is sure that 
he can judge, from that, the rest of the show. 
You, of course, are the fool, to his thinking, be- 
cause you wonder. You and your God, says he, 
just suit each other. Your God was invented 
by primitive man, Caliban scared by the light- 
ning, calling it Setebos. Point by point, says 
he, man elaborated God always as a large old 
Personage up in the clouds amid thunder and 
lightning. That is what comes of wondering. 
Men went on wondering at nature till they 
imagined God; and the pavements of the temples 
of Greece and Rome, and of Jerusalem, were 
slippery with blood, and hideous with beasts 
kicking and gasping in death, to please God; 
which all the time was only the name for a 


124 MY GRAY GULL 


man’s fright at the sight of his own shadow. 
“And that is all that there is, and quite enough 
for me,” says the fool; and “I wonder if and 
whether, and when and where, but I make it a 
point of honor never to wonder; and Nil Ad- 
mirart is the motto of my family.” What have 
we to say to this Fool? asks Dr. Paget. For he 
is so well informed, quick with references and 
authorities, expert in the use of history, criti- 
cism, and book-learning. He has had such long 
innings, and drives the ball of Religion so high 
over the pavilion of Logic; and if you cannot 
get him out, with all your modern advantages, 
how can I? Let us put aside the hope that we 
shall argue him down. It will take us all our 
time to argue ourselves up. We have our motto, 
Semper admirari; let us see what comes of 
Wonder. On the “Wonder of Pain” Doctor 
Paget says: “ ‘Fools, says Pope, ‘rush in where 
angels fear to tread.’ There are many fools who 
are afraid of treading anywhere. But angels 
rush in, without fear, everywhere; and, the more 
fearsome a place looks, the more haste they 
make to tread it. They leave the fool outside, 
shuffling with embarrassment, self-conscious, 
half-hearted, wondering if and whether, and 
letting I dare not wait upon I would. For in- 
stance, when the people next-door lost their only 
child, there was a fool who left his card, be-- 
cause he was afraid to go in; but there was an 
angel who rushed in, and broke down, and cried, 


A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 125 


so that the other two found their tears; and it 
was time that they did, or one of them would 
have gone out of her mind. And when that 
young fellow, you know whom I mean, was get- 
ting into evil ways, and there was a lot of talk, 
but none of us quite liked to interfere, it was 
old Angelus who said, ‘Call yourselves his 
friends? I call you a pack of fools, and went 
straight off to him, and said that which made 
him turn over not one leaf, but half a dozen, and 
tear the old leaves out of the book of his life 
and burn them. That is the way of all angels; 
they are absolutely fearless, and, where they 
can be of any service, there they tread. Their one 
anxiety is, that they may be too late; they dare 
not risk the shame of delay, the disgrace of not 
behaving like angels. So, if I venture into the 
presence of the wonder of Pain, I may be less of 
a fool than usual, and more of an angel. For 
the angels are there before me, and the whole 
place is full of the sound of their feet; and they 
keep saying that there is, because there must be, 
a meaning in all pain. They know that pain 
will never let go of life; that earth rings, like 
hammered iron, and always did, and always 
will, with pain, pain, pain; and they have the 
face, these bold angels, to say that there must 
‘be, therefore there is, a meaning in every bit of 
it, past, present, and to come.” At Clifton 
Springs two men, each of whom lived face to 
face with chronic suffering in the person of his 


126 MY GRAY GULL 


Dearest, discussed in a moonlight “walk”. the 
meaning of suffering. At the end of their “walk” 
the U. S. Commissioner of Education, now Chan- 
cellor of New York University, said, “What a 
poor world this would be if there were no suffer- 
ing in it!” “Christian Science does not believe in 
angels, because she does not. believe in pain, and 
they do; and the contrast between her and them, 
on a Goop Fripay, is one of the sights of London.” 
After pointing out some of the uses of pain (for 
one use, many of the finest souls are made perfect 
through suffering), Doctor Paget admits that 
there is some pain the use and reason of which we 
cannot discover. At that we have to stop. Beyond 
that, we depend on faith and not on explanation. 
“Tt is not Faith’s business to be an universal ex- 
plainer; she has trouble enough without that. 
Hope and Charity go ahead; she limps after 
them, so tired of looking at what she cannot 
see, listening to what she cannot hear. They 
two fare pleasantly; there is always a welcome 
for them, and a seat at the table; Hope tells such 
a good story, Charity spends so much for the 
good of the place; but, Faith, poor soul, cannot 
give a satisfactory account of herself, and must 
beg her way from door to door, while Hope and 
Charity are under shelter. When I think what 
she has to put up with, I am half inclined to 
say that Faith, after all, is the greatest of the 
three.” On the “Wonder of Beauty” we find 
this: “Not long ago I was in Regent’s Park, 


A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 127 


and so was the Spring. Blue sky, pink almond 
blossoms, and green buds were given away to 
all; and I had done nothing to deserve this treat. 
It is true that I had been chilled and fogged by 
a most unkind March; and I did feel that the 
Spring was bound to warm and air me, and to 
make me fairly comfortable. She had kept me 
waiting so long, while she was putting on her new 
gown; she could hardly say now that she was 
not at home. She was reviving all creatures, and 
might as well include me. But why do more? 
Why not warm and air me like a dormouse, or 
a pair of sheets, and therewith be content? Mark 
now what she did. She made love to me; she 
downright courted me, as if I were the only man 
in the world. It sounds incredible; for the Park 
was crowded with other people, not less attrac- 
tive than myself. She did not mind that; she 
Singled me out, cried to me to stop, ran after 
me, took my ugly face between her dear hands, 
and kissed me full on the lips. Think of me; 
think of her. All that she had she gave to me. 
For my sake, she had woven light and air into 
a veil, set the almond blossoms against the sky, 
and covered the hedges with shining buds; she 
had even remembered to put the amethysts on 
the dwarf rhododendrons at the lower right-hand 
corner of the Broad-Walk, just to please me. To 
the rest of us she was equally kind; she made 
love to us all. But the point is that she made 
it to me; and would have made it none the less, 


128 MY GRAY GULL 


if I had been the only man there; indeed, she 
would have made it all the more. What is the 
meaning of her passion for me, her pursuit of 
me, me of allmen? She flung herself at my head, 
and her treasures at my feet. Who was I, that 
she was thus prodigal? I had asked only for 
warmth and fresh air, and I was caught up into 
heaven. What does it allmean? Am I God, that 
Spring should thus work miracles in my name, 
and give her kingdom to me? The Fool here 
leaves his uneasy place in the Psalms, and offers 
to explain what happened in the Park. It was, 
he says, the result of your environment, acting 
on your physical faculties. Fool, say I, proceed ; 
I am deeply interested, and I seek the truth at 
any price. Well, says he, something in the Park 
was impinging on something in your nervous 
system, which wasn’t there; and it went on im- 
pinging, till what wasn’t there was there. Your 
environment created, in your subliminal con- 
sciousness, a definite series of coordinated asso- 
ciations; and that is why you thought the Park 
beautiful. Fool, say I, this explanation, for a 
thousand reasons, is ridiculous. Parks are not 
capable of creating a series of any kind. Besides, 
it was not a series; it was a blend, of my own 
making, a most supra-liminal blend. Besides, I 
did not think the Park beautiful; I tell you, it 
was beautiful. Besides, I am sure that I was 
impinging on the Park, not only the Park on me; 
for I could feel myself doing it; and I should not 


A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 129 


have been in the Park, if the Park had not been 
in me. Well, says he, I cannot argue with a 
bigger fool than myself. So he goes away; and 
I fall to wondering at the eternal fact of the 
beauty of the world.’ On the “Wonder of Death” 
Doctor Paget says: “At a funeral, I long to hear 
the Hallelujah Chorus; for though a man be dead, 
the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth; and we have 
a right to hear that, in place of the Dead 
March from ‘Saul.’ Funeral services are for the 
living, not for the dead, who hear not a word, nor 
a note of the music. When it is my turn may 
there be no hint, in words or in music, that my 
going was half so strange as my staying; no be- 
wildered airs on the organ, like questions put and 
not answered; no comparison of me to Saul; let 
my ashes be used ad majorem Gloriam Dei, 
to say that the wonder of Death is nothing, 
compared to the wonder of Life; and the 
Kingdom of Death is nothing compared to 
the Kingdom of God.” On the “Use of Wonder,’ 
this wise English physician, who belongs with 
Sir William Osler of Oxford, Drs. Weir Mitchell 
and W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, and Dr. 
Howard A. Kelly of Johns Hopkins, says: “It 
is an old half-truth that man is a poor creature; 
and, to do him justice, he is the first to take this 
view of his predicament. In his chief books on 
the subject, you find him saying clearly that he 
is not what he ought to be. The poets, alike in 
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and modern languages, 


130 MY GRAY GULL 


though they praise his great ability and mighty 
works, yet feel, through all their lauds and 
glories, like a cloud across the sun, that he is 
not worth all that music. They cannot define 
his level; they now exalt him, now cast him 
down. He sets himself to be at home with the 
apes, and immediately the angeis invite him to 
be of their company; he makes himself to be at 
home with the angels, and immediately the apes 
call him back to the top of the tree. You might 
arrange, from the poets, two anthologies, of the 
praise and the dispraise of man; and might ask 
yourself, and get no answer, how one and the 
Same species can be so variable. But you may 
find, in a single poem, both sides of man’s case. 
Note the passage from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’: 


“Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; 
The proper study of mankind is man. 
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, 
A being darkly wise, and rudely great, 
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, 
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, 
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; 
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; 
In doubt his mind, or body, to prefer; 
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err: 
Alike in ignorance, his reason such, 
Whether he thinks too little, or too much: 
Chaos of thought and passion, all comfused; 
Still by himself abused, or disabused ; 
Created half to rise, and half to fall: 
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; 
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; 
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world. 


A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 131 


“Forgive me, but you are too young to care 
for Pope; you take more pleasure in a poet of 
your own day; all honor to Rudyard Kipling. 
You love to see, by words that flash like light- 
ning, man at work, at hard work, in which God 
suddenly is there, and the Vexilla Regis go for- 
ward, as it were to bugles calling, and the 
drums of the fore and aft. Man is plodding in 
the furrows, or buying and selling in the bazaar, 
or holding on through a storm at sea, or picking 
off his country’s enemies with a rifle, or flying 
on the wings of an aeroplane; and the field, the 
shop, the sea, the war, the motor, all are God’s 
act and deed; where man is, there is his Maker. 
Well, then, here is another bit of the Essay on 
Man: and I think that Heraclitus himself might 
have written it: 


“All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; 
That changed through all, and yet in all the same, 
Great in the earth as in th’ eternal frame, 
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; 
Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 
Spreads undivided, operates unspent. 


You cannot afford to take these lines with 
amusement, nor to call them artificial, as if 
poetry ought always to be strumming on our 
emotions, with the loud pedal down, and her- 
self all untidy; whereas, the finest brocade is 
not good enough to make her gown, nor the 


132 MY GRAY GULL 


rarest marbles to build her a house, and she 
cannot be too fastidious in her station in life. 
That is why Pope’s poetry is so delightful, be- | 
cause she is such a lady. She is dressed in the 
height of fashion, but her close-fitting rime and 
rhythm do not impede the grace of her move- 
ments; she sings always in time and in tune, 
pronouncing every word clearly, phrasing every 
bar perfectly, whether her song be of beaux and 
belles, or of Deity; and she is able, without 
thumping, to get real tunes, pure as Mozart, out 
of these jangled old cottage-pianos which we call 
our hearts. Have you never read Pope’s 
‘Universal Prayer’? You will find it hard to 
better his instruction. 


“What blessings Thy free bounty gives, 
Let me not cast away; 
For God is paid when man receives: 
To enjoy is to obey. 
Mean though I am, not wholly so, 
Since quickened by His breath, 
Oh, lead me whereso’er I go, 
Through this day’s life or death.” 


Finally in his wanderings through Wonderland 
this gifted Englishman faces the problem of 
evil, and points out that for the presence of evil 
and wickedness in the world, we can find no 
use or reason. You cannot find, he says, in 
the facts of drink, murder, brutal insolence, 
cowardly selfishness, any sort of consolation ; 
you cannot by mere wonder, mere looking at 


A PHYSICIAN IN WONDERLAND 133 


them, find anything but the dark. There they 
are; look till your eyes ache, wonder yourself 
crazy, you learn nothing; try to console yourself 
with Shakespeare and Tennyson, and their pro- 
testations ring false. You cannot rest in the 
comfortable assurance that good comes out of 
evil; it only comes out because it could not 
stop in. Cover all the walls of your heart with 
pious Bible texts; the fact remains and mocks 
at you and your holy books, that the wonder 
of evil is unlike all other wonder, giving no 
hint of any purpose; meaning, or explanation, 
and having none to give. There is a badness 
outside things good, which we recognize in ex- 
perience, but find utterly unintelligible. The 
wonder of evil, if you limit yourself to wonder- 
ing, leads you to the grave where Faith and 
Hope and Charity are buried side by side, with- 
out so much as a headstone over them; it is that 
way madness lies. Evil has one thing, and no 
more, to say to us. Will yow fight? Oh, the 
ugly bully, so much bigger and stronger than 
we are, the great beast! In the name of God, 
off with your coat, and up with your fists. Of 
course he will beat you, the brute; still, you 
may get home on him once or twice. You may? 
No, you will. Then, wash the blood off your 
face, and give thanks to heaven as best you 
can; and fight him again. See, even the wonder 
of evil is not so mad as it looks. From the be- 
ginning of our world, it has challenged men, 


134 MY GRAY GULL 


after the provoking method of Goliath of Gath. 
To sit wondering at evil as a matter of con- 
templative thought, is sheer stupidity, and 
worse. To fight is the very act and presence of 
God. And I am told, on good authority, that 
they who make a habit of it do, in the long run, 
score. Partly in his words, partly in our own, 
we have reported this wise physician’s stroll 
through Wonderland; a racy and edifying 
travelogue. 


VII | 
A BUSINESS MAN’S PHILOSOPHY 


In Philadelphia one morning nearly half a 
century ago a snowy-haired, bright-eyed, ruddy 
faced gentleman boarded an Arch Street horse 
car and sat down beside me. His fine counte- 
nance made me say, “I hope you are as well as 
you look, Mr. White.” 

“T am well, thank you,’ he replied. “For- 
tunately, I broke down when I was thirty and 
was forced to learn how to take care of myself.” 

He was clean and sound physically and mor- 
ally, an admiring student of God’s works and 
ways, a keeper of his laws, his business pros- 
pering along with body and soul: “An entirely 
honest merchant,’ as Ruskin wrote on his 
father’s tombstone. 


THE LAW OF THE VERBENA 


Another day this white-haired man was walk- 
ing down Arch Street, carrying in his hands a 
pot of lemon verbena. Meeting friends, he broke 
off and gave to each a sprig of it to rub between 
fingers for its fragrance. One protested, “You 
are spoiling your plant.” 

“No, ’m not. You do not understand the 
law. Every time I break off a spray, three grow 
in its place.” 

135 


136 MY GRAY GULL 


This my Verbena Lady, whose life is like that 
plant, verified for me; broke off a spray, and 
three weeks later sent me the result, three 
healthy, vigorous ones grown out where one was 
broken off. 

My Arbutus Man‘is an educator, able head of 
a noble institution, who gave me, long ago, on a 
train on the eastern shore of Maryland, a bunch 
of trailing arbutus, harbinger of spring, its 
Sweetness unforgettable after many years. Bless- 
ings on the gracious diffusers of fragrance in an 
ungracious, malodorous world! 

The man with the verbena plant was an Arch 
Street evangelist that day, confirming Holy 
Writ by preaching on the unwisdom of selfish- 
ness from the text, “There is that scattereth 
and yet increaseth.” In the wonderland of 
moral mathematics subtraction is addition, 
division is multiplication. 

The Prime Postulate of this thoughtful busi- 
ness man’s philosophy, the Central Affirmation 
of his creed, was that the one supreme all- 
conquering and redeeming power is Love, 
whether human or divine, throughout the living 
universe human, subhuman, superhuman. He 
cherished the hope that Love Divine will ulti- 
mately subdue all souls unto Itself. 


THE REGENERATION OF RosE 


He tested it on animals. Hearing that a high- 
priced blooded mare was offered for sale cheap 


A BUSINESS MAN’S PHILOSOPHY 137 


because she had become so vicious that the family 
were afraid to use her, he sent an expert horse- 
man to examine her and report whether she was 
naturally ugly, and ill-tempered or had been 
made so by ill treatment. The expert reported 
the horse to be a fine animal ruined by being 
mishandled, teased, and irritated, so that she 
would lay back her ears and bite and kick at 
every approach. He bought her, had _ her 
brought to his country place at Green Lane, 
turned her loose without halter in a large box- 
stall, gave orders to the hostler to treat her 
kindly, speak softly, touch her gently, never 
approach suddenly or startle her in any way; 
while he hinself proceeded to make friends with 
that unfriendly beast. Mornings before going 
to business he went to the stable, talked to her 
caressingly, gave her an apple or ear of corn or 
lumps of sugar; afternoons, returning from 
town, he did the same. By degrees love took 
effect on her hatefulness. One day she said to 
herself: “Rose, don’t you see everybody is your 
friend here? Stop acting like a fool; behave 
worthy of your breeding.” Before long she had 
the manners of a perfect lady; animal and owner 
were vying with each other to see which could 
be the more polite. Utterly subdued to her lov- 
ing master’s will, his lightest wish was law, and 
then she was a happy horse, finding bliss in obey- 
ing. She longed and listened for his coming, 
began to whinny the moment she heard his foot- 


138 MY GRAY GULL 


steps in the distance, put down her head to be 
stroked and petted. Even a horse, though, 
according to Trainer Bostock, the dullest of 
animals—elephants being the most intelligent— 
can reciprocate and be transformed by loving- 
kindness. 

In a buggy ride through Fairmount Park her 
owner told the story of Rose to Bishop Warren, 
his former Arch Street pastor, and to show the 
completeness of her regeneration, her change of 
heart, he put her to top speed, then, letting the 
reins lie loose on the dash-board, said, “Whoa, 
Rose?’ Almost instantly she dropped to a walk, 
and at a second ‘‘Whoa,”’ she stopped, awaiting 
further orders from above. 

Once when he was driving alone a front wheel 
eame off and he was pitched out head foremost 
face down in the dirt. As he fell he thought, 
“If she runs I will let go the reins.” When he 
lifted his head from the ground, there was Rose, 
standing still, looking back at him as if to say, 
“IT hope you are not hurt.” Her fine face and 
glossy curve of her slender neck had never 
looked so beautiful. 


JIMMIE AND THE BEGONIAS 


In the flower house of a city park is a thin, 
little, sandy-haired, blue-eyed Irishman. For 
looks, Jimmie is like the bride of the gallant but 
truthful Scotchman, “God’s handiwork—though 
[sotto voce] not his maisterpiece,’ yet in his 


A BUSINESS MAN’S PHILOSOPHY 1389 


keen face a light which might come naturally 
from drinking beauty and sweetness out of 
Easter lilies and the chalices of all kinds of 
flowers ever since he was sixteen; now he’s near 
fifty. 

One day a lady brought in a flower-pot con- 
taining only one bare dry stick without a sign 
of life. ‘This begonia is dead,” she _ said. 
“Please put a fresh plant of the same kind in 
this pot for me.” 

“No,” said Jimmie, “it isn’t dead.” 

“Oh, yes, it is,’ said she. 

“You say it is, and I say it isn’t,’ answered 
the floriculturist. ‘Leave it with me and we'll 
see.” And just to show what can be done with 
“a poor stick of a thing,” this saviour of plants, 
in true Salvation Army spirit, nursed that 
“dead” stem to luxuriant life. Eight months 
after, when visitors admired the showy rows of 
begonias bordering both sides of an aisle in the 
flower-house with rich bloom, he told them how 
he brought all that stretch of efilorescent 
splendor from the lady’s once leafless, hopeless 
“dead” stick. “It’s lovin’ as does it,” explains 
Jimmie, unwittingly stating the law for the ani- 
mal and spiritual as well as for the vegetable 
kingdom. All up and down the living universe 
Love is the one redeeming power. The whole 
gospel is in the words, “God so loved the world.” 
McAll went to France to begin the mission 
which bears his name knowing but two sentences 


140 MY GRAY GULL 


of French, “God loves you,” and “I love you.” 
Only those two taps on the doors of human 
hearts, and he heard voices within answering, 
“Come in.” Robert Louis Stevenson won his 
way to the hearts of the Samoans at Vailima by 
the “Road of the Loving Heart” which he learned 
from James Chalmers and other missionaries. 
Afterward the natives extended that Road to his 
grave on the mountaintop of Vaca. Even 
Savages succumb to love. Helen Keller’s Story 
of My Life tells how Anne M. Sullivan’s com- 
passionate love got through stone-blindness and 
deafness to liberate the imprisoned mind of that 
seven-year-old-child from its dark cell. 

Yes, Jimmie, right you are, “It’s lovin’ as does 
it.” And 8. 8. White, the subduer of Rose (see 
his name everywhere advertising the great busi- 
ness he founded), was right, “Love is the one 
supreme all-conquering power,’ and Henry 
Drummond was right about “The Greatest 
Thing in the World,” and John Burroughs when 
he wrote, “Iaith guides me up to heaven’s gate, 

“Faith guides me up to heaven’s gate, 
And love will bring my own to me;” 


and Lord Gray, governor-general of Canada, in 
his death-bed message: “I want to say to people 
that there is a real way out of all this mess mate- 
rialism has got us into. It is Christ’s way. We've 
got to stop quarreling; we’ve got to realize that 
we are members of the same family. I’m per- 


A BUSINESS MAN’S PHILOSOPHY 141 


feetly sure there is nothing that can help hu- 
manity except love. Love is the way out and the 
way up. That is my farewell message to the 
world.” 

There is dire need of this doctrine now and 
here, near the end of 1925, in sight of the lights 
of holy Christmas time and in hearing of the 
angels’ song, “Good will to men.” The Staats- 
Zeitung published in our American metropolis 
four years after the armistice a poem entitled 
“Germans, Learn to Hate,” full of sentiments 
like this: “We have loved long enough; now we 
want to hate. Our hate will be more holy than 
our love.” The “Hymn of Hate” is the tune a 
man or a nation dies on. He who dares to set 
his hate to music and sing it as a hymn 
blasphemes against the Prince of Peace and is 
on the steep and rocky road to the bottomless pit 
where gnashing of teeth is perpetual, and where 
the worm that never dies waits to feed on him; 
he has first claim to all the hell there is. HEmer- 
son tells the haters that 


“The sense of the world is short, 
Though long and varied the report: 
To love and be beloved. 

Wisest men have not outlearned it, 
And how oft so e’er they’ve turned it 
Tis not to be improved.” 


Over all is the Divine Love, and George Matheson 
and you and I do not cry in vain, “O Love that 
wilt not let me go!” To every intelligent mind 


142 MY GRAY GULL 





doubt of the Eternal Goodness should be as i a 
possible as it is fatal. | 
“A loving worm within its clod 


Were diviner than a loveless God 
Amid his worlds.” 


VIII 


RE GALANTUOMO: 
KEEPING ONE’S WORD 


Vicrork EMMANUEL II, hereditary ruler of the 
little island kingdom of Sardinia, entered Rome 
at the head of his army in 1870, and became, at 
the age of fifty-one, king of United Italy, setting 
an honest Quirinal against an intriguing Vatican 
and overthrowing the temporal power of the hier- 
archy throned in its marble palace of eleven 
thousand rooms; a hierarchy whose preposterous 
claim was voiced in the Catholique National for 
July 13, 1895, by the Archbishop of Venice (after- 
ward Pope Pius X) in the following words: “The 
Pope is not only the representative of Jesus 
Christ, but he is Jesus Christ himself, hidden 
under the veil of the flesh. Does the Pope speak? 
It is Jesus Christ who speaks. Does the Pope 
accord a favor or pronounce an anathema? It 1s 
Jesus Christ who pronounces the anathema or 
accords the favor. So that when the Pope speaks 
we have no business to examine. We have only 
to obey. We have no right to criticize his de- 
cisions or discuss his commands.” 

King Victor’s own words about himself are a 
fair characterization: “I don’t pretend to be 
wise, but I always keep my word.” He was no 

143 


144 MY GRAY GULL 


pretender, did not “pretend” to anything; but is 
any wisdom wiser, more fundamental, over- 
topping, bracing, stabilizing and saving than 
plain, straightforward, downright promise-keep- 
ing truthfulness? 

What most impressed John Bright in Queen 
Victoria was her perfect truthfulness, her 
“simplicity and godly sincerity.” The elemental 
virtues are more essential than the ornamental, 
and with such sterling virtues the gracious 
queen dignified her court, pervaded and purified 
society, and ennobled the British realm. She 
was the best queen in Kurope in her day, as 
Victor Emmanuel was the best king in his. Thus 
Victor and Victoria stood together for the vic- 
tory of truth and honor. By contrast, between 
them on the map was Victor Hugo’s snake-eyed 
“Napoleon the Little,’ who by trickery and vio- 
lence made himself emperor of France for 
twenty years, and whom John Hay, Secretary 
of Legation at Paris, 1865-68, regarded with 
aversion and scorn as furtive, stealthy, ignoble, 
a sphinx, a charlatan. 

Sidney Bartlett said of Chief Justice Shaw 
of Massachusetts, “I know that he is ugly and 
I feel that he is great.” Victor Emmanuel, first 
king of free and united Italy, was in seeming 
a simple, ordinary man, of plebeian peasant 
tastes, averse to pomp, parade and ceremony, a 
sort of rougher, coarser, homelier Grover Cleye- 
land. In 1873 one of the daughters of Colonel 


KEEPING ONE’S WORD 145 


John A. Wright, of Philadelphia, seeing him 
riding about Rome in an ordinary carriage and 
costume like any common citizen, said, “He’s 
so ugly that he’s almost fascinating.” But 
United Italy, from the Alps to the Toe of the 
Boot, trusted him and was never deceived. A 
free people named him Re Galantuomo, the 
Honest King. And unspectacular though he 
was, not Garibaldi leading the thousand to Mar- 
sala, and giving a kingdom to his king, was more 
gallant than Italy’s rough and rugged Ga- 
lantuomo. | 

The man who keeps his word even at sore 
sacrifice is extolled in two immortal psalms, the 
15th and 24th. Honor and exaltation are pre- 
dicted for him who sweareth to his own hurt, 
and changeth not. He shall ascend into the hill 
of the Lord and stand in the holy place, and 
receive the blessing from the Lord. Likewise 
from men shall he who speaketh truth in his 
heart and always keeps his word receive honor 
and trust. Above all other titles, Washington 
said he coveted for himself the crowning title, 
‘an honest man.” Lincoln, coming in view from 
the West as “Honest Abe,’ won the East and 
the nation. Richard Watson Gilder called 
Grover Cleveland “the honestest man I know,” 
and it was Cleveland’s reputation for stubborn 
and courageous honesty that made him governor 
of his State and twice President of the United 
States. 


146 MY GRAY GULL 


A River Pinot 


John Hay, in his Pike County Ballads, glori- 
fied in rude verse a common man who “never 
lied; reckon he didn’t know how,” and who kept 
his word at utmost cost to himself. John Hay, 
Lincoln’s private secretary, McKinley’s ambas- 
sador to the Court of Saint James, and Roose- 
velt’s secretary of state, had never, even at the 
climax of his illustrious career, any reason to 
be ashamed of his eulogy of Jim Bludso, the 
Mississippi pilot. Rival boats on the river were 
given to racing. Bludso’s boat, the Prairie 
Belle, was challenged by the Movastar, and the 
Belle wouldn’t take a dare. “All boats has their 
day on the Mississip, and her day come at last. 
The Movastar was the better boat, but the Belle 
she wouldn’t be passed. So she came tearing 
along one night, the oldest boat on the line, with 
a Negro squat on the safety-valve and her fur- 
nace crammed rosin and pine.’ When Bludso 
saw his boat afire, he ran her ashore among the 
willows, leaned out of his pilot house and 
shouted down to officers, passengers, and crew, 
“Save yourselves. [ll hold her nozzle agin the 
bank till the last galoot’s ashore.” The teller 
of the rough heroic story says, “We all had faith 
in his cussedness and know’d he would keep his 
word.” Like Casabianca on the burning deck 
—a story which thrilled my boyhood—the pilot 
stuck to his perilous post; the last man “got 


KEEPING ONE’S WORD 147 


ashore afore the smoke-stack fell, and Bludso’s 
soul went up alone in the flame of the Prairie 
Belle,” his the only life that was lost. He had 
some vices, but John Hay said, “Christ ain’t 
goin to be too hard on a man that died for men.” 
We bow our heads under that verdict. 

Now, thank Heaven, no one of us has the 
responsibility any more than we have the right 
of passing final judgment on any man; but who 
of us will not agree that a “sinner” who keeps 
his word with valorous self-sacrifice is, in the 
judgment of a faithful God who always keeps 
his word, better than a “saint” who doesn’t. If 
the “Father of Lies” got Jim Bludso, what use 
could he make of a man who “never lied, reckon 
he didn’t know how”? That night the rough 
king of Italy and the rough steamboat. pilot 
were brothers of the blood in the fraternity of 
the faithful. 


A Gop WHo Kreps His Worp 


The sacrificial fidelity which keeps its word 
partakes of the divine. It becomes the throned 
monarch better than his crown; it is an at- 
tribute of God himself, and earthly power doth 
then show likest God’s when fidelity excludes 
infidelity. A pert, momentary infidel bubbling 
an instant on the Stream of Ages paraphrased 
“An honest man’s the noblest work of God” into 
‘“‘An honest God’s the noblest work of man.” 
Many millenniums before that reviler of his 


148 MY GRAY GULL 


fathers’ faith, and, by force of the fitness of 
things, the chosen graveside eulogist of Walt 
Whitman, framed his paraphrase, an honest God 
revealed himself to men, and through the ages 
all along his people proved Him and were not 
deceived. 

“Oh, what would I do if I were in trouble and 
God not friends with me?” wrote eight-year-old 
Pet Marjorie in her amazing diary. What would 
any of us do if ours were not an honest God? 
If ever we weakly “doubt if God hath kept his 
promises to men,’ let us then remember how 
David Livingstone, in deadly peril among brutal 
savages, knelt in his hut over his New Testament 
and reread his commission, “Go ye, teach and 
baptize all nations; and lo, I am with you 
always.” The lone missionary said to his soul, 
“That is the word of a Gentleman; he will keep 
his word.” Instantly darkest Africa was as 
light as day, illumined by the presence of One 
in whom is no darkness at all. Livingstone 
could say as Jesus said, “I am not alone; He 
that sent me is with me,” and as Bishop Paddock 
felt and said to himself in the wilds of eastern 
Oregon, and Colonel Hadley and John Callahan 
and John R. Henry, twenty-five years in the 
slums of New York’s lower East Side; all of 
them with the spirit of Matthew Arnold’s 
preacher in East London. 

Whittier tells how the children of Africa in 
America, like Livingstone in Africa, rejoiced 


KEEPING ONE’S WORD 149 


in a God who keeps his word. The Quaker poet 
pictured the newly liberated slaves gathered at 
Port Royal on the South Carolina coast, and, 
remembering how the bondman prized his gift 
of music and song, the gold that kindly Nature 
sifted ’mid his sands of wrong, the Quaker poet 
heard the freedmen singing: 


“We know’d de promise nebber fail, 
And nebber lie de Word: 
So like de ’postles in de jail 
We waited for de Lord.” 


Have we an honest God who keeps his 
promises to men? Countless millions of the 
faithful testify to his faithfulness. Round the 
world and back again one can hear the people 
of a covenant-keeping God singing as they stand 
in a phalanx, 


“His oath, his covenant, his blood, 
Support us in the swelling flood. 
When all around my soul gives way 
He still is all my hope and stay. 
On Christ, the solid rock, I stand: 
All other ground is sinking sand.” 


When, on the heights of Bhot bordering on 
Tibet, Bishop Warne was leaving that great 
woman Martha E. Sheldon for the last time, she 
called after him, ‘Hitherto.’ He waved his 
hand to her and cried, “Henceforth.” Those 
two words of testimony and trust cover past and 
future. They are the equivalent of the homely 


150 MY GRAY GULL 


old lines which John T. Gracey was fond of 
repeating. 
“For He has been with us, 


And He still is with us, 
And He says He will go with us to the end.” 


Never fear! Be of good cheer: Our God, like 
Italy’s Re Galantuomo, always keeps his word. 


IX 
THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 


I. GoLD-I-LOCKS AND RIBALDRY 


Amonce Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales From 
the Hills is “The Conversion of Aurelian Mc- 
Goggin”—well worth anybody’s reading. Kipling 
thinks this story is more a tract than a tale and 
is very proud of that fact. He is no more sur- 
prised at his tract than we at this discussion, 
which is neither tale nor tract; nor is it a feat 
to be proud of. It does not expect popularity ; 
more likely, “I think by the feel my forehead 
bleeds.” It risks being reckoned what Mr. 
Dooley said matrimony was considered in Ad- 
miral Dewey’s case, “a penal offinse.’” The 
gentlest comment by the ruling majority will 
be, “Trite and trivial, much ado about nothing 
unworthy of the Author.” Whatever its defi- 
ciencies, it does not lack color. 

Nor is it something written with desire or 
done with relish as was The Master of Ballan- 
trae, when, at Saranac Lake, Louis Stevenson, 
out under the winter stars, feeling that to be 
the fit time and place, said to his engine, “Come, 
let us make a tale.’ Rather has this emission 
exuded under the slow, heavy pressure of long 

151 


152 MY GRAY GULL 


experience and observation. Its style of pre- 
senting subject and evidence is like that of the 
cinematograph, snapshots of raw facts flung 
upon the screen so plainly that “the wayfaring 
man” and “he who _runs” and other casual ob- 
servers may read at a gallop; or, as Stendhal 
says, like a looking-glass dawdling along the 
road and reflecting roadside figures, actions, and 
events. 

Our subject is not of the kind that grows in 
gardens, but rather of the prickly cactus variety. 
A proud bank president was overheard boasting 
of his father, who was a minister. “My father 
was a thinker. He could take a subject and 
stand it up in the corner and take its clothes 
off and see clear through it.” That is the kind 
of a thinker needed to do justice to the present 
subject. In his absence, the subject must dree 
its weird as best it can. Its place in the ethies 
and the pathos of human life seems to us un- 
deniable and not unimportant. 

At the outset we find ourselves once more 
“With the Children,” possibly back in our own 
childhood, in contact with a side of child life 
which is not merry. 

Little bright Gold-i-locks, from sitting on the 
front steps of a Philadelphia home, came into the 
house with hurt feelings, grieved face, eyes 
brimming, mouth drawn down, lips quivering 
on the verge of a sob. 

“What's the matter?” 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 155 


“Boys talled me names.” 

“What did they call you?” 

“Talled me wed head.” 

“What did you say to them?” 

“IT said: ‘Tonsider, boys. Tonsider.’ ” 

Brutal boys. Adorable little gentlewoman! 

She is the type of a class—the Tormented ; 
and those rude youngsters are types of a class— 
the Tormentors. Types, we say, for the sinister 
and senseless guying of the red-headed is identi- 
cal in its animus with ridicule in general. One 
reason why a certain boy preferred girls was 
that they never jeered him. 

As to the ethics of ridicule, two questions try 
the case: “How does it look?’ “How does it 
feel?” Observation answers the first, only ex- 
perience the second. Only the toad under the 
harrow knows exactly where each toothpoint 
goes and how deep it cuts. For observing ridi- 
cule in active operation, to see how it looks 
ethically, it is natural and convenient to begin 
with the treatment given to some class of victims 
that is most ridiculed. One such class is under 
everybody’s eye. “Semper, ubique et ab om- 
nibus,’ that class eatches it. To them every 
clime, from pole to equator, is inclement. It 
is always open season for hunting this game. 
Our study will nothing exaggerate nor set down 
aught in malice. 

On the white marble steps of that red-brick 
house in the City of Brotherly Love where in- 


154 MY GRAY GULD 


offensive little Gold-i-locks sat was staged a 
momentary tragedy, minute but acute. No little 
suffering is caused to youngsters and oldsters 
by ridicule, which to childhood is a bewildering, 
sore surprise. The child can understand being 
petted or being punished, but persecution for 
no fault at all is unintelligible, so senseless, so 
unaccountably hostile, so dishonorable, that it 
confuses the whole rational and moral universe, 
making life a mystery and a misery. 

The voice of the tormentor is from the be- 
ginning of time. In the beginning there were 
two boys, one bad. Doubtless Cain tormented 
Abel a lot, before, by perfectly natural evolution 
in wickedness, he made up his mind to kill him 
—poisonous bud, bursting into malignant 
flower; just as Paul Leicester Ford’s athletic 
brother tormented the delicate, pale-faced little 
hunchback many years before he slew that nobler 
and brainier brother, so immeasurably superior 
to his base, arrogant, and brutal murderer. 
Nothing original in those Philadelphia bad boys 
excepting original sin. In ridiculing that little 
innocent, abloom like a flower on the front steps, 
and branding her as a bricktop, they were hoary 
and decrepit ancients of the earth. It has been 
the custom of the ages. Pagans more or less 
pious were doing that thousands of years before 
the Christian era. When the worthy Egyptians 
constructed their early religion and described 
their deities they represented Osiris, the god 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 155 


of goodness and life and light, as dark-haired 
and handsome, while Set, the spirit of evil, the 
god of darkness and death and wrong, was pic- 
tured as red-headed and ugly—a pointed in- 
timation that the auburn-haired are children of 
the devil. So nearly unanimous are mankind, 
the world over and the ages through, in guying 
the auburn-haired that any temerarious in- 
dividual who rises on the floor of his period with 
an appeal to the Court of Public Opinion on 
behalf of those who stand charged by the Grand 
Jury of the Majority with personal hideousness, 
whereby, it is alleged, they blotch the beauty 
conferred upon this earthly scene by the hand- 
some presence of the Melanochroi (as Herbert 
Spencer and the dictionary name the dark- 
haired folk), who assume themselves to be the 
ornaments of creation—anyone, we say, who 
makes a gesture of protest or offers a plea for 
mercy toward the Xanthochroi (as science 
labels the blondes), can expect at best no better 
treatment than was given by the boy to his little 
sister. When she prayed, ‘O, Lord, give 
Johnnie a new heart so he won’t torment me any 
more,” he retorted with, “O, Lord, give Susie a 
new heart so she won’t whine when I tease her.” 
At worst, he may be hooted and chased out of 
court as presenting a ridiculously trivial griev- 
ance; perhaps be told that such as he and 
his clan should be willing to suffer for the pro- 
motion of the more gleeful gayety of nations. 


156 MY GRAY GULL 


But that the grievance is not trivial is shown 
by the fact that a scientific enumerator of “Life’s 
Handicaps” specifies red hair as a serious dis- 
advantage, red including all shades, from pale- 
gold yellow, or gamboge, to terra-cotta, crimson, 
damask, scarlet, or vermillion. It is made a 
handicap solely by ridicule from the blacks and 
browns. 

lor example of this brand of ridicule no need 
to go hunting; the newspapers lay them on our 
breakfast tables. Conspicuous in this has been 
one solar sheet which claimed to shine for all. 
In its columns the Comic Spirit disported in 
caps and bells and motley at the expense of 
the brighi-haired folk, as if red hair were 
creation’s funniest joke. It lampooned them un- 
mercifully, as if jealous of other effulgence than 
its own, and could no more let this luminous 
subject alone than any other moth can keep 
away from any other bright light. It boasted 
of having invented and made famous that absurd 
fiction of “the intriguing juxtaposition of the 
white horse and the red-haired girl.” Forever 
in its columns went gayly on the guying of the 
golden-haired. It rode its hobby gleefully in an 
everlasting merry-go-round. It frivoled as 
hilariously as did Flibertigibbet Dickon Sludge, 
the court jester, at the Earl of Leicester’s 
banquets to Queen Elizabeth. Men in public 
life especially are counted fair game for such 
Sportsmanship. When and why was the consti- 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 157 


tutional amendment adopted requiring news- 
papers to mention the color of a public man’s 
hair if it be any shade of red (otherwise not), 
whether he be George Washington in boyhood 
at Fredericksburg, or Thomas Jefferson or 
General Grant at West Point, or a Michigan 
University president keynoting at a Republican 
national convention nominating at Cleveland 
for a presidential election, a Vermont farmer 
now living in the White House? With pencil and 
pad reporters look down on Congress from the 
reporter’s gallery and one member is labeled the 
“Sunset Senator,” another the ‘Pink Chrysan- 
themum,” or the “Scarlet Hibiscus,” another the 
“High-Colored Hollyhock of Kansas,” another 
the “Aurora Borealis of the West,” another is 
described as so dazzling that his fellow citizens 
have to wear smoked glasses when he is on the © 
street, while another is brilliantly alliterated as 
the “Red-headed Rooster of the Rockies.” This 
choragus of ridicule searches the dictionary for 
uncommon, baroque, bizarre, exotic words, and 
coins a few spurious adjectives of its own, with 
which to describe “pyrophoric and igniferous 
locks,” iridescent, flamboyant, scintillant, fluores- 
cent, rubescent, auroral, rufonsical, incandas- 
cent, conflagrational. Thus does this hardened 
sinner scin-till-late day after day. In one of 
its columns an apologist for slang and profanity 
declares it legitimate to use rough language on 
aggravating occasions, “especially if the person 


158 MY GRAY GULL 


addressed is red-headed.” In another column 
an irritable neurasthenic Aisthete, who airs his 
own pulchritude in Central Park, complains 
that the nurse-maids who trundle baby-carriages 
there are “the most horrific collection of human 
gargoyles to be found outside the realm of bad 
dreams,” and what exasperates him most is that 
some of them are made super-hideous by having 
red hair. The horror of it gets on his nerves. 
Why need he go to the park at all? So tender 
an infant should be kept in an incubator. Other 
journals are guilty likewise. In one of them 
an impassioned orator is described by a scurri- 
lous reporter as a “Roman candle, sputtering 
ravenous and red-headed words.’ Another is 
thus pointed at: “Yon peak of fire naturally 
vomits blazing brands from its voleanic dome 
of thought.” When a Southern statesman 
cries aloud in anguish, “The whole nation seems 
plunging hellward,” the congressional corre- 
spondent comments, “Strange effect of pigment 
upon the imagination; the bright bronze poll 
mistakes its own fiery glow for the upblazing of 
sulphurous and infernal flames.” One mellifiu- 
ous member of the Press Gang warbles this 
warning: 


“Beware of the man whose hair is so red 
He needs no candle to light him to bed.” 


Music-halls roar with laughter over a mock- 
pathetic tipsy ballad about a maiden in a poor- 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 159 


house whose “age it was red and her hair was 
nineteen.” 

One dark-haired poetaster, apparently a 
curate on his vacation, loitering along a leafy- 
arched woodland path, stoops to watch the 
rippling colors on the back of a caterpillar 
crawling at his feet; and his fantastic fancy 
likens these slow-creeping colors to a procession 
of “red-headed rectors and _ black-and-brown- 
haired choristers’ marching along a Gothic 
cathedral aisle, chanting vesper hymns. If this is 
a fling at the rectors, it is easy for them to 
counter on the curate’s simile by remarking that 
the red heads appear to lead the procession. 

One smart paragrapher scintillates thus: ‘“‘A 
flame-haired actress is getting her crowning 
glory insured. What most of us need is a com- 
pany that will insure us against the results of 
red-headedness in others.” “It has been dis- 
covered,” says one newspaper, “that the color 
of sandy hair is caused by an excess of sulphur 
in its composition. We once had a red-headed 
girl in this office, and we know now what caused 
the fireworks.” Not only do ribald sheets revel 
in ridicule, but supposed respectables sink to 
the level of it. One of Lippincott’s Magazine 
stories characterized a young girl as “A spiteful 
little red-haired beast.” Even St. Nicholas 
embellishes its young people’s pages with this 
polite welcome accorded to gentle strangers by 
a certain community: 


160 MY GRAY GULL 


“Red, red hair and a small pug-nose, 
Freckles on chin and cheek: 
These belong to the little girl 
Who moved to our street last week.” 


That street of hoodlums needs to have a school 
of manners opened by the mother of another 
little girl who said: 


“And don’t make fun, my mamma says, 
Of folks ’at’s blind or lame, 
Or got red hair or warts, unless 
You want to be the same. 
’Cause lots of times it happens so, 
Av surely if you do, 
You never, never, never know 
What’s going to happen to you. 
An’ since she told me ’at, w’y nen 
I never don’t make fun again.” 


Iiven the polite and dignified New York Eve- 
ning Post on the occasion of Chesterton’s visit 
to America revived the mean, musty, and silly 
legend that the brand put on Judas for his 
crime was that his hair turned red and re- 
called that Shakespeare speaks of a red beard 
as “Cain-Colored.” And the same urbane sheet, 
describing Admiral Sims’ noble, vigorously 
American speech in London on behalf of friend- 
ship between English-speaking nations, char- 
acterized it as ‘fa Titian-haired oration of red 
rhetoric,” an inept and slovenly description, 
absurdly wide of the mark. And the same day 
Editor Frank A. Munsey’ complained that New 





1 Died in New York City December 22, 1925. 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 161 


York City politicians “are red-headed against 
the Governor of the State” because of his trac- 
tion policy. Even that admirable school-master, 
Angelo Patri, picturing a rude boy stepping on 
the dainty foot of a gentle little lad, notes the 
rough youngster’s “red hair and freckles,” out 
of respect to age-long tradition. Worst of all, 
John Hay, recording in his diary a visit to the 
Houses of Parliament, perpetrated this infernal 
rhetoric: “Lord Eliot’s blazing head and whis- 
kers looked as if he had come through hell with 
his hat off.” 
T. A. Daley tells of his New Office Boy: 


“He’s a modest little curly-headed fellow, 
Whose age is scarcely greater than eleven, 
The effulgence of his locks of tawny yellow 
Is suggestive of a halo born of heaven. 
We are smitten with his most uncommon beauty, 
And we deem him far too perfect for this earth, 
When he modestly reports himself for duty, 
All unconscious of his transcendental worth. 
Oh, the sweetness of his early morning greeting 
In those first few days. How soft his boyish tones 
As he handed me my letters in the morning, 
With ‘A lovely day. Good morning Mr. Jones.’ ” 


But his sweetness was as the early dew. He be- 
came so “peart and sassy” that the office had to 
discharge him; all due, of course, to the sulphur 
in his “tawny yellow locks.” Even Maggie 
Benson, daughter of the Primate of the Anglican 
Church, product of the civility of a thousand 
years, dwelling in an archbishop’s palace, took 


162 MY GRAY GULL 


her fling at the Sandies in a letter to her brother 
Hugh, in 1904: “The kitten is a fright. She 
has been named Becky Sharp, because she has 
sandy hair, green eyes, and an absolutely brazen 
character.” Maggie leaves us wondering what 
constitutes brazen character in a cat. When 
Pet Marjorie, at the age of seven, described one 
of her lovers, the fair Philip, she regretted his 
too-sunny locks, which she called “his only 
fault.” 

Fiction often joins the abusive press. It is 
remarked that Charles Dickens had a habit of 
exaggerating out of all proportions some one 
marked feature of a character. If an extraor- 
dinary nose had been given to a man, Dickens 
described it at length and harped on it until the 
character became almost all nose. But to one 
of his characters, the unhappy Mr. Pumble- 
chook, he gave, instead of one prominent feature, 
a cruel multiplicity of unfortunate peculiarities. 
Pumblechook is about the queerest-looking and 
homeliest of all Dickens’ characters. He is 
described as “a large, hard-breathing, middle- 
aged man, with a mouth like a fish and dull star- 
ing eyes, so that he looked as if he had been 
choked and had at that moment come to.” And 
then, as if he had not made poor Pumblechook 
homely enough, dark-haired Charles Dickens 
plays the very dickens with the hapless victim 
of his literary ingenuity by topping off his 
ugliness with “sandy hair standing upright,” 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 163 


which is the crowning outrage upon the defense- 
less because nonexistent Pumblechook, who, if 
he had existed, might have felt as did the little 
boy when the teacher was asking the kiddies 
what they had to be thankful for. One small 
girl said, “My nice home”; one candid little in- 
nocent with a sweet face said “My pretty curls.” 
Homely little red-headed, freckled Tim sat next. 
He made no reply when the teacher questioned 
him, but sat silent, glum, and dour. 

“Come, Timmy, you surely have something to 
be thankful for.” 

“No’m. God nearly ruined me.” 

When Dickens pictures Quilp’s attorney, a 
fair specimen of the shyster lawyer, it is in this 
fashion : “Low forehead, wen-like nose, red hair, 
which was nature’s beacon, waving off from that 
dangerous strait, the Law, those who navigate 
the shoals and breakers of the world.” When 
O. Henry, in his story, “The Guilty Party,” puts 
a dark-haired young woman before the court 
with the crimson stain of murder on her hands, 
the novelist, being obliged to account for her 
awful depravity, finds the source of guilt further 
back in the heart of her father, a red-headed, un- 
shaved, untidy party who sat by his window and 
smoked and read, neglectful of his children, 
playing in the streets and learning much eyil, so 
that his little girl went to the bad. Thus the 
murder is fully accounted for: red-headedness 
in the father fusted and musted into murder in 


164 MY GRAY GULL 


the child. In another story an Irishman’s 
daughter was a mischievous little hoyden with 
bright hair and bright eyes. The father, being a 
believer in original sin, instead of correcting his 
lovely little witch when she misbehaved, 
punished himself as the original sinner from 
whom she had inherited her impish red-headed 
propensities. Of one character it is written, 
“She had red-gold hair, and badness was in her 
blood.” In another novel, “a raw-boned immi- 
grant with a stern and rockbound face” is pic- 
tured with frowsy red hair. One smart young 
liar makes sure of his portion in the lake that 
burneth by writing in a silly short story, “The 
day was warm, and the color of her hair sent 
the thermometer up five degrees higher.” With 
equal silliness Richard Harding Davis in one 
of his stories gives to a villainous and cowardly 
impostor, the meanest character in the tale, a 
beard and hair near “‘the color of a Philadelphia 
brick front, so flaming that at night they blaze 
like a torch.” So inanely prevaricated Richard 
the Mendacious. Much of this ridicule is as 
idiotic and vulgar as making faces. 

Even a church is no refuge from tormentors. 
When Sir Herbert Tree, aged eighteen, visiting 
the Sunday school of a neighboring church in 
England, felt it his religious duty to preach a 
little sermon to the children they jeered his 
bright red hair calling him “Ha’penny worth 
o carrots.” A gang of hoodlums in church! 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 165 


Why do we dump upon respectable readers 
such a mass and mess of offensive stuff? Simply 
to show how ridiculous the ridiculers are, to ex- 
hibit the quality and to intimate faintly the 
vast volume of garbage flung at the unoffending. 
If there is any offender here, the Creator is he. 
On a train between Lake George and Saratoga 
we saw two gentlemen seated together admiring 
the splendid pageant of color in the west. One, 
a trim military-looking man, said, “I never saw 
a more magnificent sunset.” 

At that, an uncouth stranger opposite got up, 
leaned down across the gentleman’s front, sized 
up the spectacle through the gentleman’s 
window, then lifted his bulk, and said: “You 
call that magnificent? It’s nothing to what we 
have in California.” 

“Well, my friend,’ responded the gentleman, 
a bit nettled at the stranger’s rudeness, “we are 
not to blame for that. God Almighty gets up 
our sunsets. Who manages yours?” 

O, scornful Malanochroi, God Almighty col- 
ored our hair; who colored or discolored yours? 
(Black is the absence of all color as white is a 
blend of all.) These critics of the Creator are 
imitators of the little boy who, being provoked 
at God for something, went out into the backyard 
and threw stones at the sky. We are tempted to 
wonder if that boy’s name may have been 
Thomas Hardy? 

Ridicule is usually reprehensible, but a fair 


166 MY GRAY GULL 


study of its ethics must recognize that it has 
legitimate uses as a weapon, remedy, instrument 
of discipline, valuable for correction and reproof, 
for curing faults, follies, and absurd habits. 
Rightly applied, “It wad frae mony a blunder 
free us and foolish notion.” It has been used 
in the education of savages to make them see 
the silliness of senseless superstitions and 
absurd, cruel, and disgusting customs. Miss 
Kingsley, relating her experience in managing 
the West Africans, says, “I could chaff and ridi- 
cule them into doing things that others could 
not make them do with a club, and I could laugh 
them out of things which others would have to 
blow out of them with a gun.” It was a fortunate 
day for little Sir Ringlets when he got out at the 
front gate and on the common where the candid 
democracy of Boyville got at him and clipped 
his curls and trimmed his frills, and, as his 
name was Joseph, named him “Josephine.” It 
was like President Roosevelt to send his children 
from the White House to the public schools to 
steep them in common Americanism, to keep 
them from thinking themselves different from 
the common run because of position, and to make 
them understand that they must start from the 
common footing along with the common crowd 
and win position only by proving themselves 
capable and worthy. When the homespoiled 
and petted boy enters college his fellow students 
can be depended on to do their part toward 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 167 


making a man of him by reducing his self- 
importance with a little hazing of one sort or | 
another. A man of great mind wrote at the age 
of seventy: “When I look back at my college 
days, I think I must have been rather an 
intolerable prig. I got some blows and kicks 
from my class mates and other fellow students 
which were a valuable part of my education. 
On the whole I think the fellows treated me 
more tenderly than I deserved.” The comman- 
dant at West Point approves of hazing as now 
practiced there under regulations. Hazing, 
when not brutal or mean, may be beneficial to 
the raw, undisciplined, callow cadet. Ridicule 
may be a harmless kind of hazing. Aristophanes 
hazed the Athenians with merciless satire and 
sarcastic laughter to lash and sting them out 
of their soft and easy ways, their epicurean in- 
dulgence, and to bring back the masculine ‘“Ma- 
rathonian muscle” in place of effeminate flabbi- 
ness. In old times there was a regularly 
appointed jester whose office was to jeer and 
mimic and “take off’ the princely or the pre- 
tentious, the high-placed and highly favored, to 
save them from overweening conceit of them- 
selves and the weak vice of vanity. The jester 
was called “Filius Terrae” (Son of the Earth), 
and his business was to keep those lofty and 
flighty gentlemen down on the earth with their 
feet firm on the ground. A measureless mis- 
fortune for the world it is that there was no 


168 MY GRAY GULL 


such jester at the court in which William Hohen- 
zollern grew up, to prevent the devil-up-ment of 
that diabolical megalomaniac and save the lives 
of eleven millions, for whose murder he, as 
Germany’s boasted lord and master, was offi- 
cially responsible, the most hideous and gigantic 
criminal in human history. And now we are 
told there is no law for punishing such a crimi- 
nal! Europe found a way to deal properly with 
Napoleon a century ago, but crime of all kinds 
has become much safer in the past hundred 
years. In these days it is coddled and almost en- 
couraged by a too indulgent public, and murder 
is the safest crime for a man or woman to 
commit. Few murderers are ever punished or 
even caught. “He is a cinder in everybody’s 
eye,” said a prominent citizen, expressing the 
general sentiment of the community concerning a 
certain indescribably cantankerous attorney, 
who never married, but was all his life the 
pampered darling of a doting mother and an 
adoring sister who nursed his vanity to such 
prodigious dimensions as made him an intol- 
erable nuisance. Administered at the proper 
period of life, some strong, wholesome hazing, 
accompanied by rattling good ridicule, might 
have prevented him from becoming a community 
pest. 

Ridicule is usually ridiculous, but when it is 
directed at what its victims are not to blame 
for—at personal peculiarities, or, worse still, 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 169 


at defects, deformities, afflictions—then it is 
cowardly, cruel, contemptible. One gentleman 
realized slightly how it feels to be described by 
one’s defects when he had his Chinese laundry 
ticket translated for him. It read: “Little man, 
ears stick out, wart on nose.” A favorite form 
of unkind ridicule is branding with derisive 
nicknames—Tow Head, Brick Top, Carrots, 
Marigold, Dandelion, Allablaze, Fatty, Skinny, 
Limpy, Squinty. Dear and sacred, even when 
odd, are pet names of the family circle, part of 
the freemasonry of the home, often as tender as 
a caress. But disrespectful nicknames, which 
sometimes stick lifelong, are a mean and hateful 
injury. In Philadelphia was a lame boy 
commonly called “Cripple Willard.” He bore 
this brand in helpless patience along with his 
affliction, and took his handsome revenge on a 
heartless public by devoting his life largely to 
the relief of the class of sufferers to which he be- 
longed. “Cripple Willard” became the famous 
surgeon, Dr. De Forest Willard, who relieved 
the misery of thousands by rectifying their de- 
formities and maladjustments. How far nobler 
he was than were they who branded his de- 
formity with his nickname! What a fine revenge 
on the thoughtless rabble! 

Go back now to little Gold-i-locks and one of 
childhood’s tiny tragedies staged on the front 
steps of that Philadelphia home, an incident too 
minute for mention, a light affliction which was 


170 MY GRAY GULL 


but for a moment, yet far from trivial if repeated 
endlessly. A wasp’s sting is almost invisibly 
small, but is a red-hot bayonet to the one who 
feels it, and to be stung by wasps year after year 
amounts to maddening tragedy in the aggregate. 
Francis Thompson says, “If childhood’s trag- 
edies are small, so is the child, so are its strength, 
knowledge, self-control, fortitude.” Take heed 
that ye despise not one of these little ones nor 
their ills. | 

“Trivial?” Who says so? Not the children, 
who alone know, but callous grown-ups, born 
tough or with memories that do not remember. 
If the ills are so trivial, how happens it that 
some of even the most absurdly minute are so 
long remembered? One woman remembers how 
a young barbarian’s rude push and tone of con- 
tempt broke her child-heart. Two boys had 
caught a weasel. The tender-hearted little girl 
pleaded, “Oh, don’t kill it, ’cause it might have 
some relations somewhere.” 

“Get out, you’re only a girl,’ said the rough 
boy, shoving her aside. 

She threw herself down in the grass and made 
believe to the rooks in the trees above that she 
was not crying. But even the dog seemed to be 
Jaughing at her, and the scream of the gulls 
circling above the rocks was derision; they were 
screaming at the poor little mite, “Get put, 
yowre only a girl.” Whitcomb Riley should 
have been there to croon his verses: 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 171 


‘There, little girl, don’t cry. 
They have broken your heart I know; 


But heaven holds all for which you sigh— 
There, little girl, don’t cry!" 


Another woman whose sobriquet in childhood 
was “Saucer-Hyes,” recalls a different anguish. 
She was born on Saint Patrick’s Day, and for 
several years was allowed to think that the 
parade which went past, wearing the green, on 
the seventeenth of March, was in her honor, and 
she danced with delight. When some one un- 
deceived the child and told her it was not her 
procession at all, but for a missionary from 
Britain who converted the Irish fifteen centuries 
ago, she was brokenhearted; all the dance went 
out of her little feet and her joy became as dust 
and ashes. Hear her: “At the present time, 
here in my home, there is seated in an arm- — 
chair a venerable doll. She is a_ hideous 
specimen of the beautiful doll of the early 
fifties. She sits with her soles well turned 
up, facing you, her arms hanging from her 
shoulders in that identically helpless “TI-give- 
it-up” fashion peculiar to dolls. With bulging 
scarlet cheeks, buttonhole mouth, and flat, blue 
staring eyes, she faces Time and unwinkingly 
looks him down. To anyone else she is stupidity 
personified, but to me she speaks, for she came 





1From Rymes of Childhood. Copyright, 1890-1918. Used by special pers 
mission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 


172 MY GRAY GULL 


to me on my fourth Christmas, and she is as 
gifted as she is ugly. Only last birthday, as I 
straightened out her old, old dress skirt, she 
asked me if I remembered how I cried, with my 
face in her lap, over that first loss of an illusion 
—and I told her quite truly that I remembered 
well.” 

We smile at such infinitesimal grief, but some 
child-souls have deeper ills. Olive Schreiner 
wrote that the barb in the arrow of her child- 
hood’s suffering was this: her feeling of lostness 
in a mysterious world, neither understanding 
nor being understood. This sense of isolation, 
the all-aloneness of the individual soul, was in- 
tolerable to the child, too young to reason about 
it, too inexperienced to have made her peace 
with it. Neitzsche, who had not one single 
happy reminiscence of his childhood or youth, 
wrote: “At the absurdly tender age of seven 
I already knew that no human speech would 
ever reach me. My real self was essentially 
aloof, inaccessible, and incommunicable.” Cole- 
ridge’s earliest experience of real mental agony 
happened in his sixth year, about the time he 
first became conscious of the separateness of his 
own existence. At this point we catch sight of 
that adjacent awe-inspiring and momentous fact 
which filled Coleridge, as well as Kant, with 
wonder, and which is the most significant and 
august of human capacities—the fact that a man 
can be at once subject and object to himself and 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 173 


yet be only one: observing himself as if from 
without, sitting on the inner rim of his own 
nature, gazing far down into its secret depths 
and cataloguing its contents, as Henry W. 
Warren and his friend saw the Arab boys in the 
great square at Alexandria sitting on the stone 
curbing of the big pool looking into its depths 
and dipping feet and hands in its water. Who- 
ever ponders that mightily impressive human 
capacity an hour, a day, a year, part of the time 
on his knees, will thenceforth stand in awe of 
his own manifold nature and of the personal 
God who made him a person also, and will 
marvel more and more at the rich and reeking 
human personality with its amazing contents 
and capacities. Not only does the individual 
realize with Coleridge and Nietzsche his separate- 
ness from others, but he has the strange ability 
to separate himself from himself, even to sit in 
judgment on his own case, acting as judge and 
jury and prisoner at the bar at one and the same 
time. <A fact portentously significant of some- 
thing great. Luther Burbank, wonder-worker 
in plant-culture, in his book Training the 
Human Plant warns against using ridicule on 
children, because, he says, “The child is far 
more sensitive to receive and retain im- 
pressions than any plant is.” 

From this digression we return to our theme, 
the sensitiveness of the child-nature. This sen- 
sitiveness is seldom realized by grownups. A 


174 MY GRAY GULL 


specialist in nervous diseases says life would be 
intolerable if the sometimes tragical sensitive- 
ness of the child-conscience continued into 
mature years. Doctor South remembered early 
paroxysms of remorse and despair, and John 
Kelman speaks of “the terrible conscience of 
childhood.” Few things are so fine in child or 
adult as conscientiousness, manifest in truthful 
speech and gentle, considerate, unselfish behay- 
ior. For one such child these traits won the 
private pet-name of “Little Gold Girl” from her 
big minister, over forty years ago, in Saint 
John’s parsonage, Brooklyn. The unrealized 
Sensitiveness of early years is tragically set 
forth in Herman Hagedorn’s “Heart of Youth,” 
when the Duke, who unwittingly has deeply 
grieved his child and now sees her dying, says: 


“I did not know that children of her age 
Could feel so deeply. When they laugh, they laugh 
So like the sunlight, so like running water. 
T did not know that when they wept their woe 
Could tap the same cold, deep, eternal springs 
That feed our older grief. 
I grope in darkness. Youth bewilders me.’ 


One experienced observer says: “What a child 
most needs is justice. It gets affection, gets 
petting, gets correction, perhaps. What it gets 
least of is justice, through not being under- 
stood.” 

Only the thoughtless and inconsiderate call 





1From The Great Maze. Used by permission of The Macmillan Company. 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 175 


the trials of childhood and youth trivial. If 
ridicule is a trivial infliction, how is it that it is 
so hard to bear? Mrs. Browning wrote of times 
when “being criticized is just being tortured.” 
But ridicule is far more humiliating and in- 
tolerable than criticism. No human being en- 
joys it and even monkeys are visibly annoyed by 
it. To be made fun of is worse than being 
pummeled. Many a boy will flinch under rid- 
icule who would stand up stoically against blows. 
Blows can be returned, while ridicule is hard 
to answer, especially if it twits on facts. Gen- 
eral Howard’s fellow cadets at West Point 
dubbed him “Pious Oliver,” and jeered at him 
because he taught in Sunday school and went 
regularly to religious meetings. Long after- 
ward, when he wore a major-general’s epaulets 
and carried an empty sleeve, he said that it took 
more courage to stand up against the ridicule 
of those young West Point scoffers than it took 
to face bullets and cannon balls at Fair Oaks 
in the battle where he lost his right arm. Nev- 
ertheless, young Howard gripped his mother’s 
Bible, and taught the boys of his Bible class, and 
so became the noted Christian general on the 
Union side as Stonewall Jackson was on the 
Confederate side. Colporteurs meet. with vari- 
ous forms of persecution. One who has sold 
Bibles all over New York from Coney Island to 
Harlem, being asked what he found most diffi- 
cult to combat, said, ‘Ridicule. It’s hard to be 


176 MY GRAY GULL 


made fun of. I’ve had the door slammed in my 
face, I’ve had a gang bully break up a meeting 
I was holding, and I could stand it; but when a 
paper bag, filled with water, was dropped on me 
while I was conducting a street meeting and my 
audience went off in guffaws of laughter, I— 
well, I won’t say I enjoyed it.” Woodrow 
Wilson wincing under a heavy fire of criticism 
said, “It is just as hard to do your duty when 
men are sneering at you as when they are 
shooting at you.” 

It is sometimes unendurable. Dickens wrote 
in Hard Times, concerning one young victim of 
ridicule: ‘He was goosed [hissed] last night, 
he was goosed the night before that, he was 
goosed to-day. He has lately got in the way of 
being goosed; and he can’t stand it.” A New 
York boy was driven out of school by it. He 
was gaunt and ungainly, six feet high though 
only thirteen years old, besides being red-headed. 
And he was so much a butt of derision among 
boys of his own age in his classes that he quit 
school rather than endure it. A boy of seventeen 
was before a city magistrate for robbing a ticket 
office on the elevated. This was his story to the 
judge: “As you see, I am cross-eyed, knock- 
kneed, and my feet are deformed. Wherever 
I got work I was ridiculed by my fellow work- 
men, till I could not stand it and had to leave. 
Out of work I was hungry, and had to have 
bread, so I stole. That’s all there is to it.” 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 177 


If ridicule is trivial, why does it rouse such 
rage, sometimes even in gentle bosoms? Frances 
E. Willard said that when a child she used to 
clench her little fists and strike in fierce resent- 
ment on being jeered at as red-headed. Richard 
Mansfield, actor, said that in his youth his 
nature was embittered by petty persecutions, 
and more than once he felt the world so antag- 
onistic that, if he could have overthrown the 
pillars of the universe, he would have done it. 
One of the Weddahs of Ceylon shot an arrow 
into a man who was poking fun at him. How 
an English detective felt under supposed rid- 
icule is seen in a curious incident in the lives 
of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth 
rented a small park and house near the village 
of Holford, where he was a stranger, not far from 
where Coleridge was living. The two friends 
were much together on the roads and paths, al- 
ways absorbed in close conversation. As is the 
disposition of some rural communities toward 
strangers, the natives were suspicious of the two 
mysterious men, and rumors about them reached 
the absentee-owners of the house Coleridge was 
occupying. The proprietor employed a detective, 
whose nose was conspicuous for length and 
breadth, to dog their footsteps and find out what 
nefarious mischief they might be up to. One 
day when the disguised constable was close on 
their heels they were discussing Spinoza. One 
of them chanced to glance back at him and went 


178 MY GRAY GULL 


on with “Spinoza, Spinoza.” As the detective’s 
ear caught only the last two syllables of the 
name, he muttered angrily to himself, “Call me 
Nosey, do they? Tl fix them.” And he sent. 
such an unfavorable report to the owner of the 
place that Coleridge soon received notice to 
vacate the premises at once. Byron’s bitter 
cynicism was chiefly caused by ridicule directed 
at his physical defects. Whether his hair was 
carroty red as described by some, or dark au- 
burn, aS in Lawrence’s portrait, has been long 
disputed in English papers. As to his worst 
affliction Macaulay wrote, ‘“He had a head which 
statuaries loved to copy, but a club-foot which 
beggars on the street mocked.’ Rude boys 
limped along behind him. For a time Byron 
was charmed by the youthful beauty of Jane 
Clermont, as was also Shelley. But when the 
proud cripple caught her imitating his lameness 
his resentment was fierce against her, and he 
grew more cynical toward mankind in general. 
As Chesterton says, Byron “went on year after 
year calling down fire upon mankind, summon- 
ing the deluge and destructive evils and all the 
energies of nature to sweep away the cities of 
the spawn of man.” 

If ridicule is so trivial, why does it provoke 
such varied retributive reactions? <A lady over- 
heard her neighbor making remarks most un- 
complimentary about her. The next day she 
went to the bank in which he was a teller and 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 179 


asked to have a check cashed. The teller said 
with austere official dignity. 

“T cannot cash your check. I don’t know you, 
madam.” 

“Oh, yes, you do,” she replied, with her 
sweetest smile. “I’m the ‘red-headed virago’ that 
lives next door to you.” 

The teller did not smile, but cashed that 
check without another word or look, and there- 
after was as cautious about slurring his neigh- 
bors as he was about cashing checks. An au- 
burn-haired mother looking out of her front 
windows saw her young hopeful pounding an- 
other boy with his fists. When he came into the 
house she asked him why he did that. ‘He made 
fun of your hair and I gave him a good licking,” 
explained that dutiful son. The only domestic 
discipline administered in that house that day 
was a few extra kisses. Another efficient de- 
fender of family honor, flaxen-haired, was going 
down a Baltimore street, with her auburn-haired 
sister, when a girl across the way jeered over 
at the Titian Tint. Instantly little Flaxen-Hair, 
swift avenger of insults, darted across the street 
and with her angry fist hit that impudent hood- 
lum a solar plexus blow in her “‘tummy,” knock- 
ing her breathless; then flew back to her 
proud sister’s side, flushed with victory but 
unaware that she had won Ovid’s beatitude, 
“Felia qui quod amat defendere fortiter audet.” 
(Happy he who dares defend what he loves.) 


180 MY GRAY GULL 


Crowned with that benediction and many others, 
Flaxen-Hair is giving her beautiful life to 
missionary work in the heart of black-haired 
China, a land marked, as are other lands, with 
many monuments of her great father’s liberality, 
far-seeing sagacity, and entire consecration, 
making the Goucher name immortal round the 
world. 

A soldier was driving a United States Com- 
missary car in Brooklyn. Some young street 
rowdies hooted at him, yelled ‘Redhead,’ and 
threw stones, one of which hit him. Just to 
frighten them he fired his revolver into the air. 
One of the shots accidentally killed one of the 
young imps. The soldier was arrested, but im- 
mediately discharged, his acquittal being in- 
tended as a warning to hoodlums not to jeer at 
men in khaki, and a sorely needed lesson to the 
impudent young toughs that infest city streets. 

Several things are inevitable for the auburn. 

1. They are sure to be made acutely con- 
scious of their peculiarity. No child born with 
red hair is allowed to grow up without having 
that fact burned into his consciousness for life. 
Even such a man as Bishop Gilbert Haven be- 
trayed this self-consciousness. In the General 
Conference of 1872 Dr. E. J. Gray of Williams- 
port Seminary met Haven in the vestibule when 
the election of bishops was going on. 

“Well, Haven, what’s the prospect?” 

“Good, Pm told; the colored people are going 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 181 


to hold a meeting to-night to pray for my elec- 
tion, and they ;say I'll be elected to-morrow; and 
then,” added Haven, taking hold of Gray’s au- 
burn locks, “there’ll be one red-headed bishop 
on the Board.” Five years later, one June 
Sunday morning, Bishop Haven and Mr. 
Charles Scott, whose guest the bishop was, and 
whose hair also was slightly inflamed, attended 
Fletcher Church, Philadelphia. After service, 
when those two and a third stood talking to- 
gether, one of the officials of the church, looking 
and listening, near, broke in with, “Three men 
so nearly of one complexion are seldom seen 
together.” 

“Yes,” flashed Haven, ‘“Shadrach, Meshach, 
and Abednego, alli three in the fire together.” 

2. They are naturally likely to have a fellow 
feeling with the Negro as victims of color- 
prejudice; whether aimed against skin or hair 
makes little difference to the victims. They 
share with the colored people what Brother 
Jasper, the famous preacher, called “the wear 
and tear of being laughed at.” In slavery days 
nearly all the auburns were abolitionists— 
Gilbert Haven emphatically so. A young Negro 
house-maid taken to church by the family she 
worked for, one morning, when the text was 
“A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” 
said when they were at home after church, “I 
understood that sermon. The reason the min- 
ister felt so bad was because his hair was red.” 


182 MY GRAY GULL 


Herself a victim of color-prejudice, ‘she had a 
fellow feeling for the man in the pulpit. 

o. The Titian Tints find themselves between 
praise and persecution, assailants and admirers; 
but first and last may easily find enough to offset 
the gibes of the ribalds. 

There are brunette families who glory in the 
one bright-haired member who gives a touch of 
brilliance to their somber group. We hear of a 
fond dark-haired father who dotingly dubs his 
daughter “Little Red Top.’ One sober-minded 
young business woman, whose luxuriant hair 
is burdensome and heating in hot weather, says 
she would have it bobbed for comfort’s sake but 
for the shock such sacrilege would give to her 
family’s pride in her “yard-long, gold-tinted 
auburn hair.” One husband, blinded by excess 
of light, was so gone daft over his wife, “down 
whose neck fell a red-tinged cascade,” that he 
could “see red” and nothing else, as is evidenced 
by his crazy verse: 


“TY hold it true that never a man 
Fought life and fought death, 
And fought friend and foe, 
For a woman’s smile or a woman’s fan, 
Whether to-day or long ago, 
Unless the tresses upon her head 
Showed red, or at least a shade of red.” 


A harmless mania, since she was his wife. The 
man who woos a red-haired maid is “following 
the gleam”; marrying, he invests in a “gilt- 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 183 


edged security’; and any family into which a 
red-haired child is born ranks at once with “the 
illuminati.” 

4.. As a rule the auburns find themselves in 
northern latitudes. The blonde belt, the Xan- 
thochroic zone, includes the Land of the Heather 
and the sandy pow. The Land of the Shamrock, 
according to Leif Ericson, had plenty of “red- 
. headed warriors,” though some were swarthy. 
The father of Leif Ericson, the Icelandic ex- 
plorer, was called “Eric the Red.’ When Leif 
explored Ireland twelve hundred years ago, he 
found it plentifully adorned with red heads. He 
described the men as of a singular temperament, 
“alternately genial and irascible, a mixture of 
gentleness and fierceness,’ and the women as 
“quiet and inviting beings, with slender pliant 
bodies, soft gleaming skin, and rich red hair,” 
sometimes falling over dark eyes—an unusual 
combination. 

Twelve centuries later a tourist on foot among 
Killarney lakes was startled by lace-selling girls 
in the Gap of Dunloe because of the fascinating 
incongruity of glossy jet black hair and light 
steel-blue eyes, a weird esthetic incompatibility. 
Occasional ‘stray migrations from Norse and 
Saxon and Celtic lands across the Alps into 
Italy gave Titian the rich colors with which he 
glorified the superb women of his canvases and 
splendored Venetian art. Those colors are seen 
occasionally as far south as Naples, but are 


184 MY GRAY GULL 


scarce in the tropics. A lovelorn swain apprised 
his northern inamorata of his return from sub- 
tropical Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, by twang- 
ing his guitar under her window, improvising 
this ardent tribute to her superior charms: 

“Underneath the warm equator 

Where Colombo gleaming glistens, 

Verdant land beyond compare, 


No sweet Cinghalese is found there 
Who has your bright bronze-gold hair.” 


5. The auburns are likely to be acutely color- 
sensitive. From this they derive some com- 
pensating pleasure. None others have more 
rapturous delight in all the multicolored splen- 
dor spread over earth and sky by the Divine 
Colorist who “makes the morning the herald of 
his glory and lifts along the glowing west the 
standards of the sun set.” To one such this 
color-sensitiveness once gave an unforgettable 
moment of ecstasy in a vision of delicate beauty, 
seeing a child with hair of crocus-gold and eyes 
of robin’s egg blue and cheeks like pale-pink rose 
petals. That day needed no vision of angels to 
make it heavenly. As between actual child and 
possible angels, the man was in a mood to sym- 
pathize with Emily Dickinson’s naive words, 
“Heaven is said to be more beautiful than earth, 
but I guess if the Lord had been here last June 
and seen what I saw, he would have thought 
his heaven superfluous.” 

6. Finding themselves a perpetual subject of 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 185 


comment, they cannot help noting with interest 
what is said of them. They find one disconsolate 
poetaster dropping this tear in his favorite 
paper: 
“Where are the crimson pates of old? 
The polls that gleamed with scarlet flame? 
No more those waves of fire are rolled, 


The world is dull and dark and cold, 
And life is pale and drab and tame.” 


They find a dignified New York daily lamenting 
editorially the diminution of “the blondes, the 
flaxen-haired, the golden yellow, and the au- 
burns, all fast merging into plain common 
brown, a lusterless, mud-colored brown, as dull 
as the plumage of the English sparrow.” But 
the solemn editorial ends its jeremiad with the 
reflection that mostly it is the male auburns 
that are vanishing, and that “Yet there is cheer; 
here and there the glorious red-haired girl still 
holds the fort, one brilliant spot of beauty in the 
wide, somber monotony.” They find themselves a 
subject of study to scientists and the universities. 
A dark-haired Harvard professor addressing the 
National Scientific Association, discusses the 
gradual decrease in the number of all kinds of 
blondes visibly proceeding now and predicts the 
ultimate extinction of the auburns along with 
the rest of the blondes. This brunette professor 
consoles us light-haired folk by saying that the 
culmination of our doom is somewhat remote. 
At the present rate of decrease it will take six 


186 MY GRAY GULL 


hundred years to extinguish us entirely; so we 
of the present generation need not worry. All 
the same it is sad to think what a somber picture 
the human race will present when what Burke 
called ‘those sad «and fuscous colors, black and 
brown,” wholly possess the earth. It will be 
like taking the bright, bloomy, luxuriant, color- 
ful months from May to October out of the eal- 
endar and leaving only the lusterless landscape 
of dun-brown November, the verdureless, color- 
less winter, and the black mud of March. Then 
the canal boatmen in the red planet Mars, looking 
through their opera glasses, will wireless across 
to learn why the planet Earth has put on mourn- 
ing; and the answer will be, “In mourning over 
the total disappearance of the Xanthochroi.” 
That accomplished hostess, Lady Dorothy Nevill, 
who maintained in her London home a sort of 
salon with notable guests of all talents from 
everywhere, gave an artistic touch of brilliance 
to her receptions and lunches by wearing a large 
bright-red wig. One of her guests, seeing her 
afterward at a picture-exhibition without her 
wig and asking why her hair was black that day, 
received the witty answer, “I’m in mourning.” 

The auburns are further consoled by an art 
lecturer in Columbia University, from whom 
they learn that meanwhile, pending their ex- 
tinction, their lot is not so hard, nor they them- 
selves so hideous, as might be, for the reason 
that Nature kindly refrains from carrying 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 187 


Schrecklichkeit to the uttermost against them. 
The lecturer says, “Nature never gives intense 
crimson cheeks and carmine lips to one who has 
brick-red hair.” That would be a frightful clash 
of colors. This consolation because of Nature’s 
forbearance resembles what the Southern woman 
had when she said God was too merciful to let 
any place be afflicted at one and the ‘same time 
with Beast Butler and the yellow fever; so a 
merciful Heaven abolished the fever as soon as 
General Butler arrived. The Columbia lecturer 
implies that we could not have forgiven Nature 
if she had perpetrated such shocking incongruity 
as crimson cheeks with brick-red hair. To have 
Dame Nature indicted for chromatic ineptitude 
would be a cosmic scandal. It is a great comfort 
to have Nature’s good taste certified by a univer- 
sity lecturer. It strengthened faith in the good 
taste of Nature’s Author. Nature seems to be 
doing fairly well with her coloring, considering 
that she never attended art lectures at Columbia 
University. 

7. Redheads are not without occasional mo- 
ments of secret satisfaction. The Titian-tinted 
girls read with a smile that a leading business 
house in Chicago applied to the Collegiate Bu- 
reau of Occupations for “a stenographer with 
red hair and blue eyes,” because, said the firm, 
“such girls are the quickest and most accurate 
in up-take and get-away;” and the comment of 
a New York daily that “such girls are usually 


188 MY GRAY GULL 


very good-looking, with peculiarly white skins 
and a charm singular among types of beauty.” 
She reads with amusement how an exasperated 
Oxford undergraduate, filling out the exam- 
ination papers as best he could, glanced across 
the room at his competitor and wrote spitefully 
at the bottom of his paper: 


“T’ve read for two years with a crammer, 
But all I can get is a gamma; 

While that girl over there 

With the flaming red hair 

Gets an alpha-plus easy, 

Plague take her.” 


She smiles again when she reads the letter which 
Bess at home wrote to Jack in the trenches in 
France: “That fellow who has your place, pro 
tem., in the office is a red-headed girl with 
freckles big enough to invite target practice. 
She’s true blue, though, and patriotic enough 
to set us all a pace.’ Well, we’ll warrant she’s 
white of soul. So there she is, flying the na- 
tional colors, red, white, and blue. What more 
could be asked from Jack’s substitute, except 
that she give him his old position when Johnnie 
comes “marching home’? When in a national 
beauty contest at Atlantic City the highest prize 
went to an auburn-haired, hazel-eyed, sweet 
sixteen, a blonde smile rippled westward from 
the Eastern seaboard to the Golden Gate over 
the fair faces of the golden-haired. The auburn- 
haired boy reads with satisfaction how, in a 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 189 


spelling match with picked scholars from all 
Brooklyn schools competing hour after hour, a 
red-headed, freckled boy took first prize, spell- 
ing down all the rest. Many a bright-haired 
young fellow held a silent jubilee when he read 
how red-headed Sergeant York, of Tennessee, 
in the fierce fighting in the Argonne Forest, filled 
one October day with glory by killing twenty-— 
eight Huns, capturing and holding as prisoners 
one hundred and thirty-two Boches, and _ si- 
lencing thirty-five German machine guns; all 
this amazing one-man feat, unparalleled in war- 
fare, certified to by the sergeant’s general, who 
calls him “the bravest of men.” Bravest, yet 
so modest that he felt “plumb scared to death” 
at the fuss made over him in New York and 
Washington and the big ovation given by the 
Tennessee Society, and wanted to get out of the 
limelight and hurry home to see his girl and his 
folks. Sergeant York said he felt so much 
stronger spiritually after fighting the inhuman 
fiends of German militarism that he wanted to 
join the army of the church militant which is 
nearest the firing line to fight devils of every 
kind. Was this because of his hair or in spite 
of it? 

When later the Boy followed excitedly the 
triumphant achievement of Sir Ross Smith, in 
his flight of near 12,000 miles from London to 
Australia; read of the icy battle with snow- 
storms on the way to Boulogne, the race to Suda 


190 MY GRAY GULL 


Bay in blinding rain, the perilous passage over 
the mountain range at Crete, the tussle with 
thunder-storms near Singapore, the dragging of 
the machine out of the quagmire into which it 
plunged at Sourabaya; read how the capital- 
city of Sydney went wild with enthusiasm when 
the big biplane circled slowly down from a dark 
cloudy sky to the landing place; they saw the 
modesty of the Master-flyer raising his hands in 
protest at the rapturous ovation, saying, “There’s 
nothing to it; anybody with our opportunities 
could do it; you have only to keep your machine 
going;” then saw that chivalrous gentleman 
pushing his two mechanics to the front saying, 
“These are the men who did it.” When the Boy 
saw all this and noted incidentally that Sir 
Ross’s hair was bright auburn, he wais able to 
refrain from weeping. 

John Burroughs credited his mentality and 
morality to his godly, gaudy red-haired father, 
who when a youth quit swearing, card-playing, 
horse-racing and Sabbath-breaking and joined 
the church; was a fond husband, a kind father, 
a good neighbor, a model citizen; improved his 
farm, paid his debts, did as he would be done by 
and lived up to his Christian profession. His 
religious feelings were warm, deep, and strong. 
He would pray anywhere. When his son John 
heard him early one morning praying in a hog- 
pen the awe-struck lad quickly ran away out of 
hearing, thinking it not proper for him to be 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 191. 


listening to his father’s private interview with 
God. John Burroughs’ intellectuality, ideality, 
and love of the true, the beautiful and the good 
came from his father’s family line, in which 
were physicians and scholars, teachers and 
preachers. When Burroughs wrote of the fiute- 
like melody and “serene devotional quality” of 
our American song thrush, the devotional was 
not in the bird but in the beloved poet-natural- 
ist, distilled into him from his red-haired father’s 
devout spirit, breathed into his young soul by 
the atmosphere of prayer in which his boyhood 
lived and grew. Fortunate boy with such a 
father, and fortunate world as well, for without 
that father, no John Burroughs. 


2. A Hoopoorp Boy 


Away back in one of the previous centuries a 
boy was born on friday, the thirteenth, red- 
headed; thus triply hoodooed from his birth, 
like an infant reprobate under the old Calvinism, 
damned before he was born. 

The hoodoo of evil omens he easily disposed 
of before he was full grown. He was reared in 
a Christian home in an atmosphere of faith and 
not of superstition. He was taught very early, 
not fear of hobgoblins and bugaboos, but trust 
in a living God, the heavenly Father of his 
earthly children. He laughed evil omens to 
scorn and defied their menace. As for Friday, 
he learned that Washington, and Gladstone, 


192 MY GRAY GULL 


and Spurgeon, and many others of the great and 
good were born on that inauspicious day. He 
made Friday his favorite day, next to Sunday. 
He liked to be one of thirteen at a dinner table, 
and through life preferred, other things being 
equal, room number thirteen in hotel or san- 
itarium, whenever they dared put that number 
on a room. He made a habit of walking under 
ladders, spilling the salt, seeing the new moon 
over his left shoulder, and challenging every 
bad-luck sign he heard of. He wondered then 
how supposedly intelligent and even Christian 
people could be so superstitious, just as he 
wonders in these days at the statement in a 
reputable medical journal that “there are sur- 
geons who will not operate on Friday, and will 
not ever operate with a red-headed nurse.” To 
see Christians paying deference to such hea- 
thenish superstitions reminds one of the wasted 
kisses referred to in “On the Road to Mandalay.” 
The heathen in his blindness is hardly more 
benighted than they in that particular. They 
are like children scaring themselves and each 
other with “The gobbeluns ’Il git ye, ef ye don’t 
watch out.” See them trying to dodge little 
devils, nailing up horseshoes and “knocking 
wood” like terrified pagans beating tom-toms to 
frighten malicious evil spirits away. Even the 
judicious New York Times, says editorially: 
“The custom of knocking wood to prevent ill- 
luck is curiously common. Why that precaution 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 198 


helps nobody knows, but that fact does not make 
the rite any less judicious.” 

The handicap of his red hair the Boy could 
not so easily dispose of, it being a fact and not 
a superstition. With this he had to worry 
along as best he could, and was part of the time 
able to bear indignities with meekness or at 
least in patient silence. When his father, at 
family prayers, read from the 119th Psaln, 
“The proud have had me in derision,” the boy 
thought he knew how the psalmist felt. But he 
wondered then, as he wonders now, why the 
dark-haired folk should tote their haughty, un- 
haloed heads so high, as if they felt themselves 
to be the supermen. As years went on some con- 
solations came to brace him. Once he got a help- 
ful hint from the story of an Emir’s son who was 
jeered continually because of his red hair until 
he went to his father and said: “Father, I 
cannot endure it—I must color my hair or kill 
myself.” 

“My son,” said the Emir, “you must neither 
dye nor die; but conduct yourself so that other 
fathers shall wish that their sons had hair like 
yours.” 

The Boy, reading this story, thought that if 
he behaved himself, he might perhaps keep out 
of prison and live till he died. 

Later other discouraging intimations came 
along to daunt his abashed and timid soul. 
Astrology’s horoscope was not the most propi- 


194 MY GRAY GULL 

tious. He was not born under the luckiest con- 
stellation ; zodiacal signs did not smile on him; 
so the stars in their courses were fighting 
against the hoodooed boy. This, in due time, he 
repelled with the reply, “It is not in our stars 
but in ourselves that we are underlings.” Also 
the Phrenologist came, felt of the bumps of his 
head and found some deficiencies, hollows as 
well as hillocks; but the Boy concluded on 
mature reflection that judging of a man’s brains 
by the bumps on his skull is something like 
guessing at the amount of money in a safe by 
feeling of the knobs on the outside. 

Last of all came Physiognomy, envisaged him 
squarely and made its comments. Its salient 
and central doctrine seemed to be that a protu- 
berant proboscis prognosticates power and con- 
notes courage—a very ancient notion. Thou- 
sands of years ago the Hindu epics pictured 
gods and heroes with prominent noses. The 
Rig-Veda contains contemptuous allusions to 
“foes with no noses.” Vyasa describes Battle- 
Strong, his hero, as having a terrible “monstrous 
nose.” It is written, “Napoleon always chose 
men with big noses ag his chief officers. His 
own nose was a good one, but he was finally 
vanquished by the owner of a bigger one.” 
Phenomenal importance is attributed to the 
nose; it fills the foreground of facial signif- 
icance and makes or mars a countenance. The 
nose most elaborately celebrated in literature 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 195 


belonged to a certain Herr Wahl, whose egre- 
gious proboscis provoked the poet Haug, friend 
and classmate of Schiller, to publish in 1804 two 
hundred witty epigrams about that prodigious 
feature. <A sore affliction is such a nose. Cy- 
rano de Bergerac, in Rostand’s play, was cursed 
with a nose which made life a tragedy of ridi- 
cule for him. Cyrano was a valiant soul, and 
when Death approached, would not lie down 
but stood erect with drawn sword to fight off 
the last great enemy, crying bravely, “Since 
Death comes, I meet him still afoot and sword 
in hand.” But even Death made fun of poor, 
persecuted Cyrano, who cries in anguish, “Why, 
I believe he too, even he, mocks my nose. Ho, 
insolent fiend!’ A famous  world-financier 
carried the mortification of a nose which was 
“like the heel of a shoe,” or “like a warty toad 
squat in the middle of his face.’ His friends 
Say that he would have given a million dollars 
to be rid of that affliction. But reconstructive 
facial surgery had not yet attained its present 
skill. To Fitz James O’Brien, poet and soldier, 
came an unexpected opportunity to have his 
nose remodeled to his taste. After one of his 
animated discussions he was obliged to resort 
for repairs to a surgeon, who gives this account 
of his patient. ‘He looked like Cruikshank’s 
cartoon of ‘the man wot wun the foight.’? Never 
have I seen the human proboscis as completely 
comminuted. He was solicitous that I should 


196 MY GRAY GULL 


make it slightly aquiline but avoid the Israel- 
itish extreme. Romans, not Hebrews, was his 
favorite epistle.” Presumably the O’Brien’s new 
nose resembled that of Pet Marjorie Fleming’s 
monkey : 


“His nose’s cast is that of the Roman; 
He is a very pretty woman. 
I could not get a rime for Roman, 
So was obliged to call him woman.” 


The most striking feature in John Henry 
Newman’s melancholy face was his nose, which 
Lecky, the historian, curiously describes as 
“very large and bending about a good deal 
in different directions to economize space.” 
(Wouldn’t that make it occupy more space?) 
An English observer in Paris during the Peace 
Conference noted that Woodrow Wilson re- 
sembled Joseph Chamberlain, the English po- 
litical leader, and said: “The most marked 
feature in both is the challenging nose, that type 
of nose on which, said Hazlitt, ‘the younger Pitt 
suspended the House of Commons.’ ”’ Such a nose 
might signal to a Senate, “You be hanged.” 
Some senators remember that it did. 

Unquestionably the prevalent idea about the 
promise and potency of the nose is fairly ex- 
pressed in a homely versifier’s picture of a 
father coming home late at night, bending over 
his sleeping boy’s crib and saying, proudly, 
“Gosh, that’s a capable nose! He’ll make his 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 197 


way in the world.” Our before-mentioned hoo- 
dooed Boy was early impressed with the impor- 
tance given to the nose, the significance imputed 
to it. In his teens he read in reports of the bat- 
tles of the Civil War that Fighting Joe Hooker’s 
great fighting at Williamsburg, Antietam, and 
Lookout Mountain was credited to his powerful 
nose, while his defeat at Chancellorsville and 
failures elsewhere were blamed on his retreating 
chin. 

The Boy, aware of his own defects, not having 
a chin like a plowshare nor “a nose like the prow 
of a ship,” as Emerson describes Thoreau’s, had 
misgivings as to his ability to face the world, 
and actually prayed to be saved from ever being 
a coward. One day in early manhood he got 
help in London. It was the day after Landseer 
died. After reading the accounts in the morn- 
ing papers he went to the National Gallery and 
spent an hour with the collection of Landseer’s 
paintings. Among them was “Wellington Re- 
visiting Waterloo.” There has long been a 
persistent legend about the phenomenal large- 
ness of Wellington’s nose. A popular essayist 
calls it “a conquering nose, able to crash through 
a world.” In Landseer’s picture the Iron Duke 
has ridden out upon his old battlefield and, 
halting his horse at a critical point on the scene 
of the great conflict, is pointing out with lifted 
arm and projecting forefinger to Lady Some- 
body, on her horse beside him, how the battle 


198 MY GRAY GULL 


surged to and fro, and where the victory was 
won. The picture gives a side view of Welling- 
ton so that the profile of his features stands out 
distinctly. The Boy could not help noticing 
that the nose was like his own, and the angels 
did not laugh at him when a wild peradventure 
fluttered in his heart that if that nose plowed 
through Waterloo, there might be a faint pos- 
sibility that there was hidden somewhere in him- 
self unsuspected the ability to play the soldier, if 
need arose and the hour struck and duty called. 
Wondering in boyhood what he would do front- 
ing danger, he never dared count himself a hero 
and was not over-fond of fighting. Yet he re- 
membered noticing once when he cut his finger 
that his blood was as red as anybody’s. Now 
and then on stirring occasions he felt tiny 
bubbles of incipient courage effervescing in his 
veins and in his soul something of the valor of 
the pugnacious little chap who said, “Mother, 
if the Big old Devil should come at me, maybe 
I would be scairt; but if any of them little 
devils comes foolin’ ’round me, I’ll knock the 
stuffin’ out of ’em quicker ’n scat.” Years later, 
when the resemblance of George Washington’s 
nose to his own came in to make a trio, the 
modest boy was in danger of dizziness. A pic- 
ture of the famous field marshal, Viscount 
Wolseley, also gave encouragement, since, not- 
withstanding his weak chin, he was a resolute 
and rocky soldier whose daring got him pretty 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 199 


well shot to pieces by the time he was twenty- 
one. 


“There’s many a chin that sticks out, 
Aggressive, bony and firm, 

At the base of the face of some lout 

Who hasn’t the nerve of a worm.” 


As time went on the red-haired Boy learned 
that even that is not a fatal bar-sinister. Some 
redheads have been fairly respectable; that was 
a gleam of light. Next to religion, the realm 
nearest this boy was literature, especially the 
supernal literature of the Book of books. He 
was born in a parsonage, in the next room to a 
library. In childhood he used books instead of 
blocks for building houses on the floor. In his 
father’s study he tumbled over piles of the old 
Methodist Quarterly Review. The parsonage 
mind is much occupied with studying and think- 
ing for the purpose of expression in speech or 
writing. Children reared in that intellectual at- 
mosphere go naturally into authorship or pro- 
fessional life. In the nineteenth century three 
boys were born, sons of ministers, in middle 
New Jersey, not far apart in time or space. One 
of these boys, James M. Buckley, minister, au- 
thor of books, edited The Christian Advocate 
thirty-two years; another, Richard Watson 
Gilder, in spirit a minister preaching all his 
life in prose and verse, was author of beautiful 
books, and edited the Century Magazine twenty- 
five years; the third, also a minister, author of 


200 MY GRAY GULL 


this book, edited the Methodist Review twenty- 
Seven years. Such is frequently the tendency 
of ministers’ children. Religion and literature 
are their native air. One of these boys, roaming 
the realms of literature, began early to note 
notable redheads among the bright lights in the 
world of letters, and in the course of time had 
a convincing list of the lustrous illustrious. 
Conspicuous in fourteenth-century England was 
John Gower, a poet in three languages—Latin, 
French and English—ranking in his day as the 
peer of Chaucer, who dubbed him “Moral Gower,” 
on account of the ethical intent and urge of all 
his poetry, and who dedicated to him as a friend 
his own “Troilus and Cressida.” He had “a 
grave face framed with long auburn hair.” In 
the fifteenth century was Shakespeare, whose 
hair was guilty of gilt. “Handsome, well- 
Shaped, hazel-eyed and auburn haired, square- 
headed and high-foreheaded, altogether a fine 
figure of a man,” so his friends tell us. In the 
sixteenth century Sir Philip Sidney is painted 
thus: “A delicate Anglo-Norman face, soft blue 
eyes, and flowing auburn hair.” The seven- 
teenth century was glorified by those two 
sublime seers and immortal dreamers, John 
Milton, with his blue eyes and auburn hair, and 
John Bunyan, who is described as “tall, large- 
boned, strong-built, with sparkling eyes and red- 
dish hair.” America’s great friend, Lafayette, 
was in his school days “the big boy with red 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 201 


hair.” In nineteenth-century England, various 
shades of red crowned the heads of John Ruskin, 
Elizabeth Barrett in youth, and the Duke of 
Argyle, author of The Reign of Law. When the 
Hoodooed Boy looked down from the visitors’ 
gallery of the House of Commons, the two figures 
he noticed most were Gladstone sitting on the 
front bench with legs out-stretched lengthily, 
half reclining, gazing wearily at the ceiling while 
listening to the debate, and near him the Duke 
of Argyle, then a member of Gladstone’s cabinet, 
as secretary of state for India. On the red-gold 
hair of that statesman, scholar, theologian, au- 
thor of the Reign of Law familiar to the Boy, his 
blue eyes lingered. Will H. Low describes 
Robert Louis Stevenson, getting off the Calais 
train in Paris in 1875, as “a figure unspeakably 
slight, a face delicate and sensitive, the high 
cheek-bones of the Scot, light hair with the 
sandy tint we associate with his countrymen.” 
Undoubtedly the most flaming and flagrant 
poll Britain ever saw among its literati was 
Algernon Charles Swinburne’s. An old lady, 
who knew him in boyhood, remembered him as 
“a mischievous red-headed young varmint.” His 
cousin, Lord Redesdale, pictured him as a puny, 
fragile lad with sloping shoulders that looked 
too weak to support that big bushy head whose 
tousled fiery hair stood off in all directions— 
red, violently red, like burnished copper. Ed- 
mund Gosse likened it to a burning bush or a 


202 MY GRAY GULL 


balloon on fire. “Swinburne of the flaming 
hair,” a London paper headlined at his death. 
Henry James and Mr. Gosse furnished two vivid 
incidents. Mr. James had a portentous capacity 
for momentous moments. He experienced them 
more frequently than any other writer of his 
generation. Wherever he chanced to be, a mo- 
mentous moment was likely to happen. One is 
reminded of Sir Philip Sidney’s saying, “Self- 
love is better than any gilding to make that 
seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties.” 
James caught first sight of Swinburne in the 
National Gallery, London. While he stood 
gazing at Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne he sud- 
denly discovered a man beside him whose un- 
covered head resembled a large, bright orange- 
colored chrysanthemum, and knew it must be 
Swinburne. That was enough to make the time 
and place momentous. Mr. James counted it a 
“prodigious circumstance” that he was standing 
at that lurid momentous moment in the presence 
of the two most famous exploiters of the glory 
of red hair, Titian and Swinburne, one the 
supreme artist of it, the other the most dazzling 
personal exhibit, the “most chevelu head in the 
world”—(chevelu applied to a comet means 
“blazing-tailed’”’). Mr. Gosse’s incident tells how 
Swinburne’s flaming, wind-blown hair once 
stopped a congregation on their way to church. 
Swinburne was visiting a country clergyman, 
and instead of going to church Sunday morning 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 203 


stood leaning over the fence in front of the 
rectory clad in a wrapper, his exuberant hair 
flaring in the sunlight like a roadside bonfire, 
a scandalous and glaring impropriety. The 
startled church-goers halted and stood staring 
like frightened sheep at the strange fantastic 
apparition, until the sexton, wondering at the 
non-arrival of the congregation, rang the bell a 
second time; when the boldest man in town 
bolted past the danger-signal razzle-dazzling 
over the rectory gate, and the rest of the flock 
stampeded after their bell-wether. 

America has none to compare with the author 
of “Atlanta in Calydon” in high-colored hair or 
high-colored poetry; but has had a few lesser 
literary lights. W. D. Howells refers to Mark 
Twain’s “splendid shock of abundant red hair 
in young manhood.” When a reporter in Vir- 
ginia City, Nevada, he was “a young man with 
twinkling, mischievous eyes, and hair of a bright 
sunny hue.” Ridiculed in early life for his hair, 
he took a rough revenge upon mankind as jester- 
at-large, joking irreverently about nearly every- 
thing and everybody. He climaxed the jests of 
his mischievous, irreverent, sarcastic years, at a 
banquet of the literary elite of New England, by 
a lying yarn which made an alleged California 
miner give an account of an alleged visit to his 
cabin by Longfellow, O. W. Holmes, and Emer- 
son. Mark made the supposed Californian 
describe Emerson as “a seedy, little bit of a 


204 MY GRAY GULL 


chap, red-headed.” Mark Twain’s scurvy joke 
was not received by the Athens of America as 
wit, but as gross bad taste and vulgar clownish- 
ness, taking audacious liberties with the Brah- 
min caste and-with those whose guest he was. 
Mark Twain was only getting even with the 
world for ridicule heaped on him in his youth. 
Whitcomb Riley, in his latter years, told of the 
terrible time he had with his hair and his 
freckles: “The fellows and girls used to joke 
about them, and what they said hurt. You 
can’t know how it hurts to have your pecu- 
harities made sport of unless you have felt that 
sting.” When this Laureate of Boyville made 
one boy say, “Mebbe I is red headed and has 
freckles and warts, but I ain’t twins and I kin 
be told apart,” he was writing about himself. 
Spite of handicaps he endeared himself to all 
who were ever boys and to all who love boys. 
Joel Chandler Harris, “Uncle Remus,” winced 
under the ridicule heaped on his rebellious red 
hair, but became the pride of the Southland and 
the joy of millions. Once he spent several ex- 
clamation points thus: “Jimmy’s hair is fiery 
red and yet he seems to be happy!!!” Emily 
Dickinson’s latest critical admirer speaks of her 
“rich, gleaming, gold-auburn hair.” We recall 
her picture of herself, a red-haired child in the 
family pew in Amherst on a sultry afternoon, 
hearing with one ear the preacher droning on 
overhead in the high pulpit, and with the other 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 205 


ear listening to the boring and bumbling of the 
bees, until, under the lulling of the two somnif- 
erous sounds, little Emily “fell asleep with the 
bumblebees and the Lord God of Elijah.” Caro- 
lina Ticknor writes of Nora Perry, “She was not 
beautiful but was very proud of her wealth of 
reddish-golden hair, which I when a child was 
privileged to see brushed out and hanging far 
below her waist. Golden hair figures in many 
of her poems.” Dorothy Homan’s description 
of “A Beautiful Baby” includes blue eyes and 
this: 

His hair is gay as 

Daffodils 

That nod and dip 

In April rain, 

And when the sun comes 

Out again 

They seem to sing 

With yellow joy. 

His hair is gay as 

Daffodils. 


White-haired, noble-faced Julia Ward Howe, 
whom we have heard recite with majestic dignity 
and quivering patriotic religious passion “The 
Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” was once a little 
red-haired girl living near the Battery in old 
New York. The brightest of American literary 
heads was T. B. Aldrich’s, brilliant inside as 
well as outside, emitting electric flashes of wit. 
“Only touch him and he goes off ike a Roman 
candle,” said Doctor Holmes. When his puppy 


206 MY GRAY GULL 


chewed one of its owner’s manuscript sonnets 
that had fallen on the floor, Aldrich sparkled 
instantly, “How did he know it was doggerel?” 

In the course of time the Hoodooed Boy, look- 
ing back through history, caught sight of 
heights that flash and courts illumined. <A 
venerable tradition says that Trojan Helen was 
one of the rich red-golds. With this hint a poet 
tells of a boy in school whose seat was by a 
window, and who, instead of studying his 
Homer’s “Iliad,” sat looking out, rapt with the 
sky, and clouds, and trees, and birds. He did 
this so much that the teacher moved him to the 
middle of the room. 


“He learned his lesson then for very gloom, 
Until came glowing to a near-by chair 
A little girl with sunset in her hair.” 


Then his eyes wandered from his Greek to that 
sweet vision. Her loose, sunset hair afloat upon 
her shoulders obscured bright Helen and 
the blazing towers of Troy. The dreaming 
boy was under a like spell with Poe, whose 
imagination was so entangled in Helen’s tresses 
that he wrote it was Helen’s “hyacinth hair” 
that drew him from “roaming on desperate 
seas” to “the glory that was Greece’; the same 
spell of beauty that made Emerson write of a 
“Hyacinthine boy for whom morn well might 
break and April bloom.” What was “the glory 
that was Greece”? Her art was certainly part 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 207 


of it. The Greeks were the master-sculptors; 
some hold they are still. None will deny that 
they knew beauty. Their tutelary goddess was 
Athena, and, of course, their statues of her 
made her divinely beautiful. When their 
greatest artists had carved their conception of 
her in purest marble as a superb woman of 
majestic mien, there was only one thing they 
could do to make the goddess more beautiful 
than mere white marble could; and they did it. 
A British scholar tells us: “They painted 
Athena’s braided marble hair that ruddy hue 
which later was vouchsafed to Queen Eizabeth.” 
‘“Vouchsafed!” As if ruddy hair were the 
crowning glory bestowable by men upon a 
goddess or by gods upon a queen. One of 
Charles Maurra’s “marvels that bloomed on 
the Acropolis,’ the auburn-haired marble 
Athena was not the only goddess to whom was 
given hair of the ruddy hue. Francis Thompson 
looks back to the time when the poetic Greek, 
beholding Apollo in the forefront of the morn- 
ing, also saw Aphrodite in the upper air “loose 
the long luster of her red-gold locks.’ In these 
modern days an imaginative American at Santa 
Barbara looking out across the Pacific sees 
Venus Anadyomene riding in a fluted shell on 
the back of the tritons, and the lithe, slim god- 
dess of the sea is “combing the tangled night- 
curls from her ruddy hair’ to be ready for the 
coming of her lover, the young rising sun. 


208 MY GRAY GULL 


The palaces and thrones of history have some- 
times flamed with “foliage of vermilion hue.” 
In English annals the most regal figure in the 
Guild of the Gilded is Elizabeth, the virgin 
queen, whose royal crown of gold rested on a 
nimbus of golden hair. During her brilliant 
reign hair like hers was so much prized that a 
court artist, painting the portrait of a queen’s 
maid of honor, made her appear fairer that she 
was by giving a reddish tinge to her hair. When 
in 1837 the Princess Victoria, aged eighteen, 
was waked early on a June morning and came 
downstairs in a dressing-gown, with her auburn 
hair falling loose over her shoulders, to receive 
from the Archbishop of Canterbury and other 
august officials notice of her succession to the 
throne by the death of her uncle, the king, and 
the English crown rested again on the despised 
color, the ridicule of redheads ceased once more 
in Britain. According to Andrew Lang, Mary 
Queen of Scots had “bright russet hair and red 
hazel eyes.” In Titian’s time red-gold was so 
popular that the Venetian women to whom 
nature had denied that ornament acquired it by 
staining their locks with some vegetable extract, 
and then sitting in the sun for hours with their 
long tresses spread over broad straw hats from 
which the top of the crown had been removed. 
Kugenie Montijo’s radiant hair “of just the 
shade that Titian loved to paint,” was one of 
the charms that won Louis Napoleon’s admi- 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 209 


ration and helped win what little heart a man 
with such snaky eyes and treacherous soul could 
have. And, during the years she sat beside 
Victor Hugo’s “Napoleon the Little’ on the 
throne of France as empress, auburn of every 
shade was “all the rage” in the French capital 
and provinces. At one time the most admired 
among European princesses was the Duchess 
Isabel, of the modest House of Savoy—a strik- 
ing and athletic figure who held the brilliancy 
prize for the twofold reason that she had the 
Showiest head of carroty-red at any court of 
Europe, and also was champion gymnast and 
fencer, an imposing and formidable person 
surely. 

The relative rank of different colors seems not 
generally known. The decorative value of red is 
known to magazine makers, who report that it 
is the most effective color for front-cover dec- 
oration, darker colors being used to set it off; 
and to fashion-plate makers and window-dressers 
who know that no picture of styles and no show- 
window groups are complete without one gold 
or auburn-headed figure. A famous creator of 
fashions says: “No type of beauty can be more 
strikingly lovely than the woman with vivid red 
hair. She may be as decorative as a mural 
painting.” Advertisers know the charm of this 
type of beauty, and in subway cars, before Gov- 
ernment Railroad Administration took the 
beauty out of life, the loveliest panel was Phoebe 


210 MY GRAY GULL 


Snow in robes of white upon the road of an- 
thracite with her sunrise head of hair. Mac- 
millans tempt our Aisthetics with the enticing 
announcement that one of their issues will have 
“a gay cover in golden-rod yellow.” 

Poets and artists know the indispensable or- 
namental value of the female of the species, 
know beauty when they see it, and cannot keep 
house without the light of radiant-haired 
women. Shakespeare’s Julia and Silvia have 
auburn hair, and the tresses of Milton’s Eve are 
golden. In Tennyson’s “Princess,” his “sweet 
girl graduates” have “golden hair.” The splen- 
did lines, 


The red gold cataract of her streaming hair 
Is tumbled o’er the boundaries of the world, 


seem not extravagant when applied to the bril- 
liant beauty of Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, 
in view of her influence on the fate of empires 
through her fascinating of Caesar and Anthony. 
Less fortunate is Lowell’s “Legend of Brittany” 
when it lapses into exaggeration by making the 
lavish gold of Margaret’s loose hair seem to 
diffuse a glory even in the dark. A Manxman 
mourns the belle of the region: “The fairest maid 
in all our town was she, light flaxen with a touch 
of marigold.” One poet’s chief lament at a 
graveside is, “Too bad to shut the coffin lid on 
the gleam of such golden hair.” 

When Poe laments over the body of that “rare 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 211 


and radiant maiden whom the angels name 
Lenore,” so young, so fair, so debonair, he notes 
that though death darkens her eyes, the golden 
light lies bright upon “her yellow hair.” In 
Aldrich’s poem, “White Edith,” the pictorial 
center is his word-painting of her in the fire-lit 
room and in the antique chair: 
“That slight girl shape, 


The auburn braid about the saintly brows, 
Making a nimbus, and she white as snow.” 


Aldous Huxley’s most delightful poem is 
gilded with these lines: 
“Jenny, adorable, has anyone the right 
To look so lovely as you look to-night, 
To have such eyes and such a helmet of bright 
hair?” 
No more charming picture of a child has ap- 
peared in current verse than Mrs. Joyce 
Kilmer’s Deborah, “Her hair a ruffled crest of 
gold.” Instances like these have embellished 
poetry from the dawn of literature until now. 
Our venerated Dr. William F. Warren, rec- 
ondite scholar and far-foraging littérateur, dis- 
covers for us this rare sonnet, written by 
Father Edmond of Notre Dame and the Heart 
of Mary: 


“To SAINT Mary MAGDALEN 


“Mid the white spouses of the Sacred Heart, 
After its queen, the nearest, dearest thou; 
Yet the aureola around thy brow 

Ts not the virgins’—thine a throne apart. 


212 MY GRAY GULL 


Nor yet, my Saint, does faith-illumined art 
Thy hand with pain of martydom endow; 
And when thy hair is all it will allow 
Of glory to thy head, we do not start. 
O more than virgin in thy penitent love. 
And more than martyr in thy passionate woe. 
Who knelt not» with thee on the gory sod, 
How should they now sit throned with thee above? 
Or where the crown our worship could bestow 
Like that long gold which wiped the feet of God?” 


As for the artists, great painters have always 
known the artistic value of such colors, fore- 
most among them Titian, whose canvases often 
glow with the luster of red-gold auburn hair, 
crowning his superb women. This master col- 
orist, the central figure of the Renaissance in 
Italy, was no dilettante esthete, but a virile, 
rugged individuality, never lowering his art to 
the level of voluptuousness; spiritual enough to 
picture the gentleness, intellect, and dignity of 
Christ as few artists have. And he it was who 
perceived and exalted the wsthetic preciousness 
of rich red which the unartistic ignorant despise 
and hoodlums mock and jeer. The high charm 
of his great pictures still splendors Europe with 
brightness in the galleries of Venice, Rome, 
Florence, Dresden, Paris, London, Madrid, Ant- 
werp, Munich, Vienna, and Petrograd, un- 
less the insane malice of German vandals has 
destroyed them. One of his pictures was used 
by a wise artist to comfort a little girl who was 
erying in a Venetian art palace because her 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 213 


brother kept calling her “redhead.” Her mother 
said, “Never mind, he’s only teasing you.” But 
the artist knew a more effectual way. He lifted 
little Charlotte in his arms, held her up before 
one of Titian’s richly colored paintings, and 
showed her that the bright hair in the picture 
was like her own. He told her it was by a great 
artist who admired that color most. 

“Do you mean it’s pretty?” asked Charlotte. 

“Tt’s beautiful. All artists think so. Don’t 
ever cry again about your hair. It’s beautiful,” 
said that son of consolation, and saved that 
child then and there from torment, and lifted 
her above chagrin and humiliation for all sub- 
sequent years. 

True artist-souls, like Titian, see beauty, 
whether physical or spiritual, when others do 
not, just as true poet souls see poetry unperceived 
by common eyes. 


“The poem hangs on the berry-bush 
Till comes the poet’s eye. 
The whole street is a masquerade 
When Shakespeare passes by.” 


Two other artists before Titian’s time knew 
beauty, physical and spiritual, and saw both 
in a child and an old man. In Florence in the 
fifteenth century lived an old gilder, a master 
in his line, who shunned the light of day because 
his face was so disfigured by a nose that was 
covered with wartlike growths and discolored 


214 , MY GRAY GULL 


by purplish inflammation, that crowds of boys 
jeered at him on the streets. For this reason 
he seldom ventured out until late at night. One 
day a wealthy patron, calling at the old gilder’s 
shop to order some work, was accompanied by a 
beautiful child, Son of a princely house. The 
child was not repelled by the disfigured counte- 
nance, but, rather, won by the gentle soul which 
smiled from the good old man’s face. Soon they 
were looking lovingly into each other’s eyes, 
and presently the boy was nestling close to the 
old gilder, the two drawn together by the pure 
gentleness and sweetness of nature which they 
had in common. At that moment Ghirlandajo, 
foremost of Florentine artists in his day, hap- 
pened in at the gilder’s shop, and seeing the 
spiritual unity under outward contrast, cried, 
“Saints in heaven, what a picture!” and having 
sketched it went home to put it on canvas. 
When it was finished Botticelli, looking at it, 
said: “Ghirlandajo, when your painted ceilings 
and your Saint Jeromes are forgotten, this 
representation of the triumph of a beautiful soul 
over bodily disfigurement will be treasured as 
your masterpiece.” The happiness in the old 
gilder’s face was due to his seeing that the child 
with the heart and eyes of an angel did not 
notice his ugliness; just as old black Mammy’s 
face shone with happiness and her joy was proud 
within her when the white child nestled on her 
neck and golden curls rippled, over her shoul- 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 215 


der, the child not noticing that she was black, 
not having yet wandered far enough from the 
kingdom of heaven to be caught by barbed-wire 
entanglements of the hateful color line. Who 
was it said, “Except ye become as _ littie 
children” ? 

Sir Joshua Reynolds sometimes imitated 
Titian. His well-known picture in the National 
Gallery, London, of the child Samuel listening 
to the voice of the Lord, gives the beautiful boy 
light auburn hair. Of painters in our time, 
Whistler came nearest to being a Titianite. In 
his pictures shown in the Metropolitan Museum, 
five of his eight little girls have light au- 
burn or reddish chestnut hair. When he was 
experimenting in symphonic color-schemes, as 
against color-contrasts, he planned his famous 
“White Girl,” a tall, slender, spirituelle figure 
in white gown, standing on a fur rug in front 
of a white curtain, her trance-like pose and rapt 
expression giving the beholder a sense of the 
spiritual world. The model Whistler chose for 
the painting of this in his Paris studio was a 
young Irish girl with magnificent copper-colored 
hair and cream-white complexion. In his pic- 
ture, “The Gold Girl,’ Connie Gilchrist has a 
gold bodice, sleeves and buskins, as well as gold 
hair. Noting the too-dark tendency of some 
monochromatic painting, one critic commends 
a recent monochrome by a blithe young French- 
man, “a little pink girl, warm and tender and 


216 MY GRAY GULL 


gay, with blue eyes but pink shoes, pink dress, 
and pink hair.” In the same museum the 
painting of “The Lady Lilith,” by Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite, is a picture of 
mystic poignant charm, in which the color- 
center is the copious rippling, red-gold hair 
which the fair woman is combing out. In the 
vivid painting by Henry O. Tanner, son of 
Bishop Tanner, of “Jesus in the Home of Mary 
and Martha,” which hangs in the Carnegie In- 
stitute in Pittsburgh, both of the Bethany 
sisters have red or reddish hair. 

Ruskin, “High Priest of the Beautiful,” not- 
ing the preciousness of color in the beauty 
scheme of the world, puts the glory of radiant 
hair along with the blue of the sky, the gold of 
the sunshine, the verdure of leaves and grass, 
the crimson of the blood flushing the cheek, 
the iris of the eye; without which life would 
be far less lovely. In General Lew Wallace’s 
Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, a book full of 
portraits, Solomon has “hair of the tint of gold 
in the sun,” as David has when he goes before 
Saul; the Virgin Mother has violet eyes and 
golden hair; and Jesus’ hair is soft, wavy and 
“of auburn tint, bright red-gold when touched 
by the sun.” 

From George Meredith’s gay raillery against 
it, we learn of a modern renaissance of Titian- 
ism. In “Celt and Saxon” the portrait of Jane 
Mattock with her fiery aureole of hair on the 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 217 


wall of the breakfast room in the family mansion 
sets Meredith going in this fashion: “Jane’s hair 
is of a reddish gold-inwoven tint that would 
have been labeled in her grandfather’s time as 
carroty. The girl of his day, thus afflicted by 
Nature, would have been shown wearing it 
with some decent downecast sulkiness. The red 
truth would have been told with dextrous con- 
cealment—a rope of it wound up close as a bud 
for the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of 
tight cornucopias plastered down flat to the 
temples. But what does our modern artist do 
with Jane’s marigold hair but flare it to the 
right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, 
and flaunt its exuberance all abroad, as if he had 
sworn to make us admire it as a poetical splen- 
dor, against all our traditions.” 

The final answer to the coarse and ignorant 
ridiculers of red, and auburn, and gold is that 
those are the colors the sun loves best and glo- 
rifies most. 

When Alice Freeman Palmer was teaching 
the girls in Boston slums and showing them 
how to be happy, she told them, for one thing, 
to look every day for something beautiful—a 
flower, or leaf, or cloud, or star, and to look at 
it long enough to say, “Isn’t it beautiful.” One 
day one of those poor girls was compelled to 
stay indoors and tend a sick baby. There was 
nothing pretty in the dingy, gloomy room, but 
a beam of sunshine came in the window and fell 


218 MY GRAY GULL 


upon the baby’s hair, and the girl saw it and 
cried, ‘‘Isn’t it beautiful?” Mrs. Palmer went 
to see that baby and tells us: “You have heard 
of artists raving over Titian hair. Well, as the 
sun played on this baby’s hair there were the 
reds and the brownish golds which are seen in 
the Titian hair. Yes, it was truly beautiful.” 
At all seasons the sun loves to shine into the 
squalidest tenement to gild with glory the slum- 
child’s red-gold hair, 

The sun loves to reveal on a Warwick morn- 
ing hill-top the amber .retinal reflex, deep-hid 
in a dark-haired young girl’s eyes; and by a 
Lakehurst noon brookside a spot of brighter 
amber in her hair betraying secret auburn ten- 
dencies, almost a black and gold effect in one 
about whom, in a vivid dream, a middle-aged 
woman said to a white-haired man, “She is 
very sensitive to the beautiful things people tell 
her she will grow into.” 

The winter sun of a Sabbath morning on a 
city street loves to glorify from head to foot 
a reverent maiden on her way to church. Ina 
home whose hospitalities have earned it the 
name “Hotel of the Universe” the divine artist 
arranged a color scheme of rare balance and 
completeness by sending into it three little girls, 
one brown-haired, one light flaxen, and one that 
bright auburn of which at times the sun makes 
a dazzling spectacle. Walking to church with 
that Honorary Member of the Titian Tints Club 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 219 


one brilliant December morning, the glittering 
sunlight glorifying her bright purple costume 
and splendid hair, the visitor at her side said to 
her enigmatically, “I feel like the Assyrian’— 
not that the man ever “came down like a wolf on 
the fold,” but that “‘his cohorts were gleaming 
with purple and gold,” like the Assyrian’s. That 
daughter of a friend’s home does not know that 
the visitor’s private name for her thenceforth 
is “Cohorts,” linked in his literary memory with 
Milton’s “bright cohorts of the cherubim.” 

The sun can glorify such colors even to dying 
eyes. Michael Fairless makes the face of a 
dying man in a wretched garret in the East End 
of London light up with pleasure when “the 
sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the 
chimney-pots red and gold against the smoke- 
dimmed sky,” making the dull chimneys look 
like high gateposts to the House Not Made With 
Hands. Red and gold are the sun’s favorite 
colors, nearest akin to himself. 

Where now is the ridiculer with his insolent 
or idiotic grin? In the light of all the glory we 
see streaming from these Children of the Sun, 
how does the scoffer look, sitting up there in 
the seat of the scornful on the high terrace of 
his self-conceit? Is not he himself the most 
ridiculous of all asinine creatures? And does 
not any human face with a sneer on it belong 
in the Rogues’ Gallery at police headquarters? 

This tribute to the Titian Tints, a tribute 


220 MY GRAY GULL 


woven of facts and not of fancies, is to gibbet 
guilty persecutors and to hearten with its cul- 
minating homage innocent victims, many of 
whom are the light of the world. 


- 38. SHYNESS 


Ridicule is responsible for most of the shyness 
which afflicts sensitive souls. In the famous 
Boston Saturday Club the chief talkers are said 
to have been Lowell, Holmes, and Agassiz; 
Longfellow less talkative; while Emerson and 
Whittier were the least loquacious. A familiar 
story says that, at a meeting in honor of an 
illustrious member of the club, the most eminent 
name on the list of speakers was Emerson’s. 
When his turn came and he was called to speak, 
he unfolded hesitatingly to his full six-feet 
height, stood silent some moments in apparent - 
embarrassment, and then sat down without 
having uttered one word, leaving his place on 
the program vacant. Supposing this story to be 
true, his behavior seems unaccountable. Who 
would expect a man of Emerson’s ability to 
flunk at such a time and place? The occasion 
was important, he was in the presence of friends 
even if critics, he was the most distinguished 
member of that club of celebrities, his genius 
the most crystalline, his mind the most purely 
platonic, in American literature. Why did he 
fail? Was it fear of the highly critical 
Sanhedrin before which he stood? Was it a 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 221 


sense of unpreparedness, and a decision to say 
nothing rather than offer the occasion anything 
below his own idea of its merit? Speculation 
is useless. Quite possiby he could not have ex- 
plained why; perhaps there was no rational 
reason. It looks like sheer shyness, which is 
instinctive, inscrutable, and cannot give reasons. 
A similar story is told of Thackeray. Riding 
to a meeting where Dickens was to preside and 
where he was expected to speak, he said to his 
friend: “They think I can’t make a speech, but 
TV’ll show them. I’m going to speak to-night,” 
and he named his subject. Yet when the moment 
came he balked and uttered not a word. In the 
cab going home he said to his friend, “That’s the 
greatest speech that was never delivered.” 

Emerson’s intellectual ideals were transcen- 
dentally exalted. High ideals are stern, im- 
perious masters. I once wrote to Dr. A. J. 
Lyman: “You speak of ideals which you think we 
have in common. Ideals are tyrannical. Some of 
mine have treated me severely, giving me forty 
lashes on the bare back at times. But I will 
cringe to them forever and die kissing their 
feet.’ Besides Emerson’s exacting ideals and 
well-known shyness, sayings of his indicate that 
he was by preference and on principle rather a 
listener than a talker. For example: ‘The 
scholar’s secret is this, Every man I meet knows 
something I do not know. Wisdom for me lies 
in learning that thing from him.” 


222 MY GRAY GULL 


Public speakers not a few, even some of the 
ablest, have experienced “stage fright,” fear of 
an audience; sometimes a nervous chill. Report 
says that if John Bright had to make a speech 
before night, he would complain at breakfast 
of not having slept well, feeling poorly, and 
would remark nervously that it seemed likely 
to be a chilly day. A noted minister used to tell 
how once, in his very early ministry, when he 
was on his way to preach in a little country 
church, he felt so frightened as he approached 
the place that he left the road and hid among 
thick trees until the gathered farmers, tired of 
waiting for the preacher to arrive, had driven 
home. The scared young fellow literally “took 
to the woods.” Dr. O. S. Baketel confesses to 
having done the same thing substantially. 

J. M. Barrie, having been invited to come to 
America, to speak at the Lowell centenary cele- 
bration in New York, with the promise of an 
audience of at least one thousand, let his native 
diffidence play in his reply: “If I had to ad- 
dress a thousand persons, my voice would sound 
from under the table, and only those in the 
front seats would hear. If the thousand would 
come singly to me under the table, I might be 
able to address them one at a time.’ Many 
years ago Max Strakosch was touring Canada 
with his company of singers and Emma Thursby 
as his leading lady. At Ottawa, before be- 
ginning the evening’s entertainment, he told his 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 223 


nephew, aged seventeen, to go before the curtain 
and ask the indulgence of the audience for Miss 
Thursby’s voice; “Tell them she has taken cold, 
and is a little hoarse.” The young Austrian 
sped to the front of the platform, and, on finding 
himself out there alone, close to a vast crowd, 
was so frightened out of his wits that he lost 
his English and told them with a German accent 
that Miss Thursby was “a small horse,’ whereat 
the house exploded in a roar of laughter. For 
this blunder his uncle Max did not reprimand 
him, but said, ““You’ve put the house in a good 
humor and it does not matter now about Miss 
Thursby’s voice.” A clear enough case of stage 
fright experienced by many. 

Shyness is no sign of inferiority, but rather of 
the superior fineness found in the higher mental 
and physical organisms. It is the reaction 
which comes from a highly sensitized impress- 
ibility. It is due to no defect, but to delicate 
susceptibility. The capacity for being thor- 
oughly seared is a condition for real courage, 
valor which is not stolidity. ‘“Aren’t you 
afraid?” asked one soldier of another who 
seemed cool in battle. “If you were half as 
scared as I am, you’d have run long ago,” was 
the reply. A young brave graduate of North- 
western University and Union Theological Sem- 
inary, undertaking a series of five-minute noon- 
hour shop-talks to men in the works, wrote, “It 
was. like jumping off Brooklyn Bridge.” Not 


224 MY GRAY GULL 


the weak, nor the coarse, nor the common, but 
the gifted and the rare and the refined are often 
shy. Nor is it any evidence of demerit; often 
those who have nothing to be ashamed of are 
as hesitant and timid as if they had done some- 
thing wrong, while others who ought to be 
ashamed of themselves are unabashed and 
brazen and bold-spoken. Examples confirmative 
of this abound. Really pathetic is E. R. Sill’s 
letter from California to a friend in Boston, 
when he contemplated returning East. The poet 
and essayist was full of dread at thought of fac- 
ing his old associates. He was in a panic of self- 
distrust lest he find himself out of tune with 
his Eastern environment, unable to function up 
to expectations of friends and critics, or even 
his own standards of behavior and performance, 
and so be a disappointment to his circle and a 
mortification to himself. He shrank from the 
ordeal and hesitated whether to come at all. 
Iiqually painful reading is the reply written by 
Joel Chandler Harris at the age of twenty-seven 
to a midle-aged lady friend who had urged him 
to come out of his seclusion, mingle more with 
people, go into society, make friends. His 
answer suggests the sensitiveness of one whose 


skin was sore to the touch, so did he shrink from 


social contact, so conscious was he of his defects, 
which his imagination magnified. He confessed 
to this wise, honest, sincere friend that he simply 
could not endure society. He felt himself des- 


ae 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 225 


titute of social graces and unfit for social inter- 
course. Francis Thompson cites Shelley as an 
instance of a sensitive spirit made hyper- 
Sensitive and shy by petty persecution from his 
fellows, who, though they stopped short of 
physical injury, caused him to be likened by 
Thompson to a little Saint Sebastian, stung by 
barbed arrows which filled his school days with 
rankling resentment. Shyest of women was 
Emily Dickinson, the Hermit Thrush of Am- 
herst, who hid herself out of sight and out of 
reach in impenetrable seclusion, not only from 
the world outside her front gate, but even from 
old and honorable friends who traveled dis- 
_tances in hope of seeing her. More recently two 
nieces of Henry Adams have told us that he was 
painfully sensitive and shy of revealing himself, 
shrinking from the approach of strangers and 
sometimes even of friends. He invented many 
devices for concealing himself. One of his ways 
of hiding from company was to devote himself 
exclusively to any child that was within reach. 
With utter humility and self-abasement he 
would become the awe-inspired playmate of the 
tiniest child that came where he was. 
Biographies, autobiographies and testimonies 
of friends give the impression that the number 
of those who regard themselves as handicapped 
by disadvantages (which.they exaggerate) in 
comparison with others (whose advantages they 
magnify) is larger than we would expect to 


226 MY GRAY GULL 


find in the class counted worthy of biographical 
commemoration. And shyness resulting from 
the notion of personal inferiority is made to 
seem more prevalent than is generally supposed. 
Instances multiply upon our notice continually. 
A great teacher revealed his sensitiveness over a 
defect so slight that no one else ever noticed or 
thought of it, by speaking of himself in a letter 
as “the man with a broken face.” That gifted 
woman Mary Russell Mitford betrayed her un- 
happy consciousness in a letter thus: ““My verses 
are not graceful. They are lumpish, short and 
thick-squat, like their luckless author. If you 
wish a correct likeness of your poor little dumpy 
friend, get a round radish or an overblown peony 
by way of head, on a good-sized white turnip 
by way of body, and you have her figure.” 

We have been told lately that Eliza Savage, 
the little lame lady whom Samuel Butler eu- 
logized in verse and in his books as surpassing 
all other women in brilliancy and goodness, and 
with whom he cherished a fond and intimate 
friendship through many years, lived her life 
without love’s fruition and died “paling with 
a hid chagrin” in bitterness of heart because 
her lover held back from marrying her on 
account of her homely face. Charles Darwin 
was afraid to propose to his cousin, Emma 
Wedgwood, because he conceived himself to be 
repellently homely. “A very unnecessary fear,” 
said the lady, whose acceptance filled him with 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 227 


childlike gratitude for her goodness and con- 
descension in consenting. 

John Ruskin, High Priest in the temple of 
Beauty, was unbeautiful in the outward man 
and was acutely aware of his defects. When 
Maggie Benson wrote to him, asking for his 
picture, he told a friend he would not send it 
because he was so ugly. When he was lecturing 
on Modern Painters at Oxford University an 
undergraduate described his “tawny reddish 
hair, retreating chin, and nose hooked like an 
eagle’s beak.” In addition his mouth had a 
queer pugnacious twist from one lip having been 
torn by the bite of a dog when he was a child. 
He let his full beard grow to hide his face as 
much as possible. Nevertheless when Ruskin 
closed his last lecture, he so overwhelmed the 
Oxonians with awe that no one spoke or moved; 
a great hush fell on the assembly. They no 
more thought of the usual thunder of applause 
than they would think of applauding ‘the 
angels’ song that makes the heavens be mute.” 
John Addington Symonds believed, until he was 
a grown man, that he filled everybody with 
repugnance; if anyone happened to pass without 
noticing him, he construed it as an intentional 
slight, a sign of aversion. A. C. Benson recalls 
that in childhood and youth he suffered torture 
from a morbid fear of being ridiculed or disliked. 
Emerson all his life felt himself ill adapted to 
society, a kill-joy, casting restraint and gloom 


228 MY GRAY GULL 


and chill on the company by his presence. Shy- 
ness began in him in boyhood when he and his 
brother, who had only one overcoat between 
them, were made to feel their poverty by the 
jeers of other boys, who taunted him with, 
“Whose turn is it'to wear the coat next?” Vulgar 
rudeness! 

A well-mothered and wise-mothering woman 
writes: “My own dear little mother suffered 
through life with a belief that strangers were 
repelled by her unpretty face; while her friends 
and her children loved her face, seeing only the 
charm of mind and heart that looked forth.” 
Such shun society as if bowing to Milton’s dic- 
tum, “It is for homely features to stay home.” 
A sensible woman of fifty confesses to her 
oldest friend that she has all her years been 
hampered and deterred by the notion that she 
is dull in comparison with more vivacious and 
voluble persons; whereas her friends know that 
she is above the average in brains and bright- 
ness and solid good sense. Not a few fine 
women have been made shy by similar notions. 
Though they did not visibly pale and grow thin, 
as did the little lady of the Castle in Browning’s 
“Flight of the Duchess,” yet they carried, like 
her, “a hid chagrin.” 

Pathetic indeed is Laurence Hutton’s account 
of his sufferings in early life because of his phy- 
sical peculiarities and the heartless comments on 
them, which exaggerated them to his conscious- 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 229 


ness and intensified his pain. For years he was in 
dread of the coming of February 14, because of 
the comic valentines he was sure to receive with 
caricatures of his big, bulbous nose and his red 
hair. When Thackeray saw him and laid his 
hand on the boy’s head little Laurence thought 
the great man, like everybody else, was noticing 
the color of his hair in pity or amusement, and 
shrank from the touch until he looked up to 
Thackeray’s kindly face and heard him ask 
gently: “My boy, what are you going to be 
when you become a man?’ When _ Laurence 
answered, “A farmer,” the big man said, ‘*Well, 
whatever you are, be a good one.” 

The sting of early ridicule lingered in Eu- 
genie, ex-empress of France, even to old age. 
When past sixty she told a young English 
woman at Chiselhurst: “When a child I was 
made painfully conscious of my defects, physical 
and mental; felt myself inferior to my sisters; 
but was made most ashamed of the color of my 
hair.’ Ashamed of that red-gold splendor 
which was the admiration of the French court 
in her twenty imperial years! . 

That famous woman Jane Addams, of Hull 
House, tells how she pitied her father, whom she 
considered very handsome, whenever he took her 
anywhere with him because she was such an 
Ugly Duckling. She avoided walking with him 
on the streets, and would let go his hand and 
stand aside from him in public places, to pre- 


230 MY GRAY GULL 


vent people from seeing that “ugly pigeon-toed 
little girl, whose crooked back drew her head 
very much to one side, was the daughter of that 
imposing-looking man.” The sensitive child 
wanted to save her adored father from mor- 
tification on her account. 

Why do we cite a score or more of instances 
in illustration of a single trait? Simply to show 
how widely prevalent shyness is and what kind 
of persons suffer from it most. 

One of Lewis Carroll’s child friends relates 
how delightfully kind he was to her when she 
was seven years old—a thin, nervous, scrawny 
child and very sensitive about her poor ugly 
little self. One day in the Botanical Gardens 
Lewis Carroll told her Hans Andersen’s story of 
the “Ugly Duckling” and impressed on her that 
it was better to be plain and good and obedient, 
respectful, truthful and unselfish than to be 
a pretty child, spoiled, selfish, vain and dis- 
agreeable. And che said comfortingly, ‘“Never 
mind, little Ducky, perhaps some day you will 
turn out a swan.” Such a change is not an in- 
frequent happening. “What a pity you are so 
homely,” said a tactless relative to a growing 
girl at the ill-proportioned awkward age, when, 
in Lanier’s words, “She do grow owdaciously.” 
She broke that poor child’s heart. Twenty-two 
years later, in that same college town, three 
gentlemen conversing on the street, lifted their 
hats to that girl as she passed, and one, a lawyer, 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 231 


said, “There goes the finest looking woman in 
town.” 

What was the idea Rodin, the powerful 
French seulptor, tried to put into “The Man 
with a Broken Nose’? ‘Two things plainly 
visible on it are pain and power. That marred 
man has not less intellect than Rodin’s 
“Thinker,” and has more will. Was Rodin say- 
ing that those two things go together; that 
power is born of pain; that consciousness of out- 
ward defect rouses resolution and compacts 
character; that the soul capitalizes its suffering 
into capacity and richness of resource? Did 
this modern artist, who has something of 
Michael Angelo’s ruggedness, get his idea from 
the spoiled face of that great master sculptor? 
M. Angelo was in his day “The Man with a 
Broken Nose,’ a fellow student named Tor- 
rigiana having broken it in a fit of jealous anger 
in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. Thackeray 
was in his day “The Man with a Broken Nose.” 
It was a beautiful aquiline until an older pupil 
at Charterhouse School hammered it flat with 
a boot heel. However these wonderings about 
Rodin’s meaning be answered, two things are 
plain. One is that no disfigurement or deface- 
ment, no defect in appearance, can minimize 
merit or diminish greatness. The other is that 
educational environment and artistic culture 
and intellectual atmosphere cannot surely pre- 
vent boys or men from being savages. 


232 MY GRAY GULL 


Why should a man be reviled even in polite 
circles for his facial nonconformities? Most 
uncourtly was the behavior of the King’s Men 
when they vented their dislike of an eminent 
essayist and critic by dubbing him ‘Pimpled 
Hazlitt.” What philosophical necessity was 
there for Professor William James to comment 
on what he called “the flagrant physiognomy” of 
William Hunt, the artist? “It will require a 
long time to civilize mankind, to work the ape 
and tiger out and work the angel in,” thought 
John Muir in the Arctic when he saw his com- 
panions shooting polar bears just for the savage 
sport of killing. With Muir “near to nature’s 
heart meant near to God.” He would not 
needlessly set foot upon a worm, nor purchase 
his pleasure at cost of suffering to the meanest 
thing that breathes. John Muir was one of 
God’s own gentlemen. 

Some of those who presumably count them- 
selves comely are severe toward the less favored. 
That perverse, pernicious, pestiferous thinker 
Nietzsche, disastrous misleader of many German 
minds, promulgator of ideas which brought 
ruin to his country, despiser of the Man of 
Galilee, opposer of the teachings of the Sermon 
on the Mount, was pitiless toward the uncomely. 
His doctrine is that the world was made for 
the strongest and the handsomest. His Cal- 
vinism is scientific and German. Roughly 
speaking its reasoning runs toward action thus: 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 233 


Only the fittest should survive; we are qualified 
judges of fitness; our judgment is that we our- 
selves are the fittest; nature decrees that the 
less fit shall disappear; our duty is to cooperate 
with nature by accelerating the disappearance 
of the unfit. Therefore, exterminate them. 
Attention, company! Fix bayonets! Forward, 
march! A fair sample of Nietzsche’s feeling 
toward the uncomely is his sneer at Socrates: 
“He was ugly, and ugliness is often the sign of 
a thwarted development. The typical criminal 
and the decadent and defective are ugly. 
Socrates was a chronic valetudinarian and a 
mistake.” 

Of like zsthetic temper with Nietzsche toward 
the less comely was Wainwright, a dark-haired 
English artist, who, when arraigned in court 
for murdering Helen Abercrombie, a tall blonde 
with yellow hair, shrugged his shoulders and 
said, coolly: “Yes, it was a dreadful thing to 
do, but she wasn’t pretty and she had very thick 
ankles.” Therefore he felt himself excusable 
for putting poison in her jelly. 

Also we have witnessed most senseless and 
cruel fastidiousness on the part of our national 
government. When America entered the war 
a young man of splendid physique, perfect 
health and more than average mental ability, 
left college to give his life to his country. He 
was refused admission to the Naval Academy at 
Annapolis solely because of a small birthmark 


234 MY GRAY GULL 


on his face. For a slight surface blemish, in no 
way affecting his fitness for efficient and hand- 
Some service, a first-class man was rejected, his 
mortification embittered by a feeling of in- 
justice most stupidly inflicted. He had more 
reason to be ashamed of the senselessness of his 
government than of himself. 

Taking Lincoln by his looks, Nietzsche would 
have put him in the class with Socrates as “a 
mistake.” Our great Liberator was described 
by an American contemporary as “a Hoosier 
Michelangelo, having a face so awful ugly it 
becomes fascinating with its strange mouth, its 
deep-cut crisscross lines and doughnut com- 
plexion.” John Drinkwater makes Lincoln 
conscious of all this by putting in his mouth the 
words, “I can take ridicule. I’m trained to it 
by my odd face and form.” Homely and humble 
Abe Lincoln was murdered by a proud and hand- 
some man, Wilkes Booth. Yet it has come to 
pass that Americans looking on that gaunt and 
angular figure feel themselves, like Lowell, “face 
to face with one of Plutarch’s men,” and recall 
without irreverence Isaiah’s vision of Jehovah’s 
servant, whose ‘“‘visage was marred more than 
any man and his form more than the sons of 
men.” Is there a man on earth today who ap- 
proaches his stature or resembles | 


“That kindly-earnest, brave foreseeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American”? 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 235 


The first, but not the last American. We hear 
no voice now denying that the rugged, uncomely 
man who slept and forgot to wake at Oyster 
Bay, January 6, 1919, was an American. That 
fine Americanized Briton, Alfred Noyes, with 
a feeling of part ownership in the Founder of 
this republic, looking back to our Revolutionary 
War, speaks of “George Washington, our 
Englishman, who fought the German king.” 
Marks of individuality serve to diversify the 
world. Chesterton insists that there are char- 
acter, dignity, and distinction in being different 
from the common run, and that it is one’s 
peculiarities that make one noticeable, in- 
teresting, and enjoyable. He says that Rem- 
brandt in his paintings declared the sane and 
manly gospel that a man is dignified, not when 
he is like a Greek god, smooth and symmetrical 
of form and feature, but when his face has in- 
dividuality, say “A strong, clubby nose like a 
cudgel, a boldly-blocked square head, and a jaw 
like a steel-trap. As we like to see a crag jut 
out in bold decision from the face of the cliff 
and to see the cedars stand up hardily on the 
cliff’s top, so we like to see a nose jut out deci- 
sively and to see a friend’s red hair stand up 
hardily in bristles on his head.” We quite 
agree with Chesterton, and in confirmation of 
his statement we will e’en admit that we like 
our Chesterton just as he is, huge and por- 
tentous. We would not wish him any less 


236 MY GRAY GULL 


mountainous nor his hair of any other color, 
both of which features the newspapers could 
be relied on to feature when he landed in New 
York. The reporters on the pier where his ship 
docked, as he looked down from the upper deck, 
found him fascinating, and fondly did their best 
at picturing him. They noted first his dimen- 
sions, six-feet-three and proportionately large 
of girth, but not unshapely or unwieldy; then 
his red-gray hair, breeze-blown by the river- 
wind; then his large, pink face with its 
ruddy nose and the copious red mustache 
sprawling thereunder; lastly something un- 
expectedly ethereal about the prodigious great 
man, a far-visioning look in his innocent, child- 
like eyes; a strangely buoyant, ready-to-fly ex- 
pression. Oh, no; taking our Chesterton just as 
the expert reporters pictured him, we would not 
alter him one whit; we would not darken or 
diminish a single hair of his head. Of all our 
English visitors few have made a sharper im- 
pression than Matthew Arnold when he came 
over to replenish his pocketbook by a lecturing 
tour and to make a critical study of this middle- 
class country. It is said that when Arnold 
learned that the assassin of Lincoln shouted 
Latin as he fled, Sic semper tyrannus, he began 
to have hope for America. The leaven of cul- 
ture, if not of sweetness and light, was work- 
ing. Whitcomb Riley interviewed him in a 
half day’s ride on a train in the West and 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 237 


recorded his impressions: ‘Physically heavy, 
Seotch hair, Scotch eyes, Scotch complexion, 
mutton-chop whiskers, cow-catcher nose over- 
hanging a basement-story chin; self-sufficient, 
stolid, yet trying to do better. A joke that 
tackled him would hide its head in shame and 
skulk away and weep.” Yet, says Riley, “I like 
his sturdy grandeur.” And so do we. The aus- 
terity of Arnold’s countenance and character 
are his peculiar charm. A college professor, 
lecturing on Arnold at a Summer School, was 
tempted by the demon of malicious mischief to 
begin by passing around a photograph of that 
“flower of Oxford,” letting the class get its first 
impression of Arnoldian “sweetness and light” 
from the man himself. But the professor says: 
“T checked myself. I dared not let the class 
see that repellent phiz.’ Nevertheless, we 
would not alter one line of it. The preciousness 
of Arnold was in his sturdy differentness. 

And there is our own Bishop Bashford, whom 
we crown with love and honor. He is described 
as an awkward country youth, entering the 
University of Wisconsin, lanky, uncouth, un- 
erect, a butt of ridicule. He never became the 
glass of fashion or the mold of form, but he kept 
his characteristics life long, and every one of 
them endeared him to us. Not one outline or 
peculiarity would we alter. His stooped shoul- 
ders, his odd little lubricating laugh which even 
in his public speech bubbled without cause like 


238 MY GRAY GULL 


the spontaneous laughter of a child; his half- 
lisping utterance, and even his phenomenal, 
inimitable cough, not one of those would we 
lose from our memory of Bashford, that apos- 
tolic bishop, who had the brain of a sagacious, 
farsighted statesman, wise with the wisdom that 
cometh from above, and the pure heart of a 
child, harmless as a dove, guileless as an angel, 
a confirming illustration of the lines 


“The best men ever prove the wisest too; 
Something instinctive guides them still aright.” 


Not for anything would we have James W. 
Bashford changed into the likeness of any man 
we know. 

And now, without intending any disrespect, 
we will inquire of Mr. Handsome Phiz, proud 
of his fine fagade, whether it is, on the whole, an 
advantage to a man to be conspicuously hand- 
some. And as for prettiness, does anybody 
admire it ina man? Bishop Fowler lecturing on 
Abraham Lincoln said, “Next to a mangy dog 
I hate to see a pretty man.” 

Which is the more impressive, Adonis or 
Hercules? The almost girlish grace and beauty 
of Raphael or the smashed and wrinkled face 
of his rugged rival, Michael Angelo? James 
Buchanan’s smooth, bland, grandmotherly cler- 
ical look, or Lincoln’s craggy features and gaunt 
angular form? The urbane, polite society club 
man’s countenance and well-groomed figure of 


THE ETHICS OF RIDICULE 239 


Chester A. Arthur; or the knitted, intense, 
stressful, dynamic face and sinewy, hard- 
muscled body of Theodore Roosevelt? The 
suave, affable, courtly pink complaisance and 
shapely build of Chauncey M. Depew or the 
nobly rugged head and form of Cleveland H. 
Dodge? Which of these is most impressive? 

Some years ago a certain man was published 
as being the most perfect specimen of physical 
symmetry and soundness then existing. By 
scientific measurements and tests applied by 
experts he was the prize model of manly grace 
and beauty. Apparently, that was all there was 
to say about that pink of perfection. He was 
never heard of before or since. Victor Em- 
manuel I was the ugliest man in Italy, but the 
best king in Europe in his day—the best because 
the most honest and faithful. He said truly, 
“T don’t pretend to be wise, but I always keep 
my word.” His signed pledge was not “a scrap 
of paper.’ He towers high forever above the 
despicably wicked gang of intentional, habitual, 
incorrigible liars who ruled and ruined Germany 
and incurred the contempt and abhorrence of 
the civilized world. 

Tennyson describes Maud, passing in her 
carriage, as “Perfectly beautiful, faultily fault- 
less, icily regular, splendidly null. Dead per- 
fection, no more.” Not such have been the 
mothers of the strong, wise, great men of the 
earth. None of them were born of peacocks or 


240 MY GRAY GULL 


fashion plates and few were mothered by female 
beauties. Not such was the mother of King © 
Lemuel, who gave her son the immortal descrip- 
tion of the ideal woman preserved for all genera- 
tions in that wonderful last chapter of the book 
of Proverbs. It is a portraiture of sterling char- 
acter, not of superficial charms. Grace and 
beauty are not dwelt upon. The only mention 
of them says they are deceitful and vain. It is 
a portrait of a womanhood compact of sterling 
virtues and imperishable values, a woman that 
feareth the Lord, undeniably magnificent. She 
laughs at time to come, for her ineffable charms 
are such as age cannot wither. Her husband 
and her children will always rise up to call her 
blessed, and her works will praise her in the 
gates. Before the most august assemby of men 
and angels she has no reason to be shy or 
abashed, this truly ideal woman. And great is 
her reward in heaven. 








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